


jewelweed

by cygnus (sunsprite)



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Famous, Angst with a Happy Ending, Found Family, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Personal Growth, Slow Burn, Smoking, skz are in university except for jisung & minho
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-13 07:55:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 45,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28525068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsprite/pseuds/cygnus
Summary: Jisung, disillusioned by the skeletons in his closet, meets a crying stranger at a party. And much to his dismay, he meets him again, and again, and again, after that.
Relationships: Han Jisung | Han/Hwang Hyunjin
Comments: 66
Kudos: 155





	1. rot

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by [can i call you tonight?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLGW7xUQFFk&ab_channel=TheLazylazyme) by dayglow & [why do you feel so down](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OHLTyTMvck&ab_channel=DeclanMcKennaVEVO) by declan mckenna
> 
> tags will be added as i update! i'm not sure how many chapters this will be once i consider which parts of the story to divide (this was supposed to be a one-shot & idk wat happened . rip my google doc reaching the 100-page mark) but hopefully maybe around 5-ish? we'll see ^.^ 
> 
> shout out to oli for reading this & motivating me <3 also shout out to my brain bc it comes up with weird ideas when i haven't slept for days 
> 
> **cw** : i don't think any warnings are needed for this chapter other than the fact that past alcoholism is veeery briefly mentioned in passing!

Jisung first met him at a party.

Involuntarily, at least. He’d been dragged to a house party at the behest of Changbin to celebrate the end of his midterms and to act as his designated caretaker, but Jisung never liked parties. Parties meant crowds. Crowds meant people. People meant noise. Noise meant heat. Heat meant touch.

And Jisung didn’t like touch. He didn’t like the way strangers smothered him with their hands and let their odor linger on his clothes, or the way their whiskey breaths grazed against his skin when they leaned in too close. Jisung could see the intent in their eyes against the low lights -- the intent behind their fingertips that fluttered against his cold cheek, but it was always intent. Never something more.

Maybe Jisung would have liked that, if he was nineteen again. To be desired and wanted with a kind of fervid desperation, validated through the worship of his body by strangers who could barely see his face in the gibbous of the night.

But he was twenty-two now, sitting at the kitchen counter while he restlessly nursed a water bottle in between his lap and watched the crowd before him move like a multi-headed beast. He was twenty-two now, sitting at the kitchen counter while he restlessly nursed a sort of emptiness that festered in the left side of his chest.

It was hard to be at a party when he felt like an open wound.

Jisung almost laughed. He opened his bottle of water and took a swig that alleviated his parched throat after spending the entire night avoiding all the alcohol being shoved into his hands, and afterwards, slipped off the counter. He went to half-heartedly search for Changbin to make sure he was still alive somewhere in the collision of bodies. Jisung didn’t have to look too hard, though, when he spotted him mingling with a few of his friends from university by the stairs.

The slight anxiety prattling in his stomach abated at the sight of him. Jisung took one last look at Changbin before he turned around and weaved through the crowd to reach the back door for a smoke.

The cynosure of the party was mainly focused on the host of the party, who was currently dancing on a ping pong table out in front while taking their clothes off among the cheering crowds. Jisung escaped the flashing lights and thunderous music as he stumbled out onto the back porch; it was as though he crossed a threshold into another world when he was immediately greeted by a lungful of fresh air and a sense of quiet.

But he wasn’t alone.

There was somebody else already occupying the steps of the porch with their head bowed down. Jisung rummaged through his pocket and took a step forward that made the planks of wood beneath his feet groan, and almost immediately, the stranger snapped his head around. His red-rimmed eyes were glossy under the dim porch light.

Jisung blinked. He clutched the pack of cigarettes in his hand tightly. He shouldn’t have given into Changbin’s pleads. He should have stayed home. If he was home, he would have avoided this.

The stranger turned back around and vigorously rubbed at his cheeks. Jisung had half the mind to return into the house, but with the bass ricocheting against the walls and travelling all the way to his throat, Jisung decided against it. He looked back at the stranger, where the untidy scrawl of the moonlight hung a delicate crown above his head.

Jisung quietly made his way to the steps. He sat all the way at the edge until his shoulder hit the handrail. With an affectation of indifference, he took out his pack and lighter and cupped a hand around his mouth as he lit his cigarette up. He took a deep drag before he exhaled slowly, watching the plume of smoke disappear towards the moon.

Without looking, he asked, “Want one?”

There was sniffling, then a beat of silence. Jisung extended the pack and lighter towards him as an offer, and after a mild pause, the stranger accepted. There was the click of his lighter and a sharp inhale. His head was tilted back as he let the smoke disappear through his lips, the cigarette caught between his slender fingers.

“Thanks,” he murmured as he slid the pack and cigarette back. Jisung shrugged in response and shoved his belongings back into the pocket of his denim jacket.

They sat there together in silence. Jisung pulled up his hood and leaned his head against the railing as he watched the ribbons of smoke travel up to the graveyard of stars only to disperse into nothingness. He tapped the end of his cigarette downward and flicked the ash onto the ground.

As he looked out at the backyard and the flickering lights in the distance, it reminded him of the summer days of his childhood, where he’d peek out the window of his house to watch his step-dad sit in a low folding chair out on the Bermuda grass of their lawn, soaking up the sun with a bottle of beer in his hand and a blue book in the other. Jisung remembered exactly which house it’d been and which book his dad had been reading. It was a vivid, unsettling image.

Jisung plucked the cigarette from his mouth and blew gently into the wind. Remembering was always an irritating thing.

He slanted the guy a glance when he heard a loud sniffle. He was still crying -- his jaw trembled from the way he rigidly clenched it and tears tracked down his cheeks even as he furiously wiped at them. Jisung was a little perturbed. He never knew how to console people who were in distress, let alone a total stranger. He had the social graces of a common housefly.

But that was it, really. He was a stranger. Jisung wasn’t obligated to comfort someone he didn’t know. Or, at least he wasn’t obligated to put any effort into comforting. He’s never been much of a nice guy, anyway.

So, Jisung looked down at his boots, and asked, “Not a big fan of parties, huh?”

Much to his surprise, the stranger chuckled. It was a dry, little sound that escaped the derisive curve of his lips. “Nah,” he said quietly as he fiddled with the silver ring around his forefinger. “I never know what to do with my hands.”

Jisung hummed. He pushed his palms against his knees to stop his legs from bouncing. “Didn’t peg you as a smoker.”

“Neither did I with you,” he retorted.

“It wasn’t an accusation,” Jisung said, tapping his cigarette. “Just an observation. But I’m flattered you think the same way. Means I’m still fresh-faced. My friend hates it when I smoke. Says that I’ll turn all wrinkly and sallow by the time I hit thirty -- which, is a lie, because it would take a lot to destroy this perfectly handsome face sculpted by the gods themselves.”

The stranger scoffed. “Handsome? I don’t see it.”

“Your vision is blurred by your tears.”

“That’s awfully narcissistic.”

“Well, I’d rather call it -- “ Jisung splayed his fingers out in the air, “confidence. You should try it sometimes.”

He snorted. “No thanks.”

Jisung let out a low whistle. “I believe we’ve determined the source of the waterworks, then.”

The stranger wrinkled his nose in obvious displeasure and let the cigarette burn on its own in between his fingers. He watched the cherry at the end of it glow a bright red. There was a fine tremor to his bottom lip, and even as he opened his mouth, no words came out. Jisung sighed when he realized his words had been misinterpreted, and turned in in his seat so he faced the stranger and leaned his back against the railing.

“I wasn't asking you to spill your literal sob story. I was joking. You shouldn’t overshare with a complete stranger, anyway. Just -- I don’t know. Keep your chin up or something.”

“Thank you for your absolute words of wisdom.”

Jisung puckered his forehead at the blatant sarcasm seeped in the stranger’s words. He could have left it at that, but Jisung wasn’t sure what prompted him to elaborate when he never liked to explain himself in the first place. But he lifted up a hand, anyway, despite the trouble. He pulled his finger back and let go of it to convey an image he had in his head.

“What I was trying to say is that -- we’re not as weak as we seem. Humans, I mean. We’re not made of glass. We could totally be bent out of shape, but we’ll always find a way to return back to our original form no matter how long it takes -- kind of like those springs made of steel.” His eyes wearily flitted from the ceiling of the porch to the stranger. “Is that better?”

He was staring at Jisung with a slightly glassy gaze. The faint shadows of the moonlight cascaded across his features and Jisung noticed the mole underneath his left eye. Then he turned away, bringing the back of his hand to his nose to wipe the snot from them and shielding the small twitch of his lips.

“Sure,” was all he said.

Jisung huffed quietly and stubbed his cigarette out on the porch. For the remainder of the night, they sat there in silence whilst in the company of each other, with Hyunjin looking down at the dying embers of his cigarette and Jisung looking up at the hazy film of stars. He tapped his fingers against his knee before scratching at the black denim with his fingernails. Jisung closed his eyes at the music blaring from inside, diluted past the walls, and wished he was anywhere but here.

He opened his eyes when he heard a phone ringing to the tune of a video game song. The stranger rummaged for his phone tucked away into the pocket of his jeans, and answered with a dampened greeting. He’d stopped crying, at least -- left with swollen eyes.

“I’ll come find you,” he said before ending the call, but he made no move to stand up from the porch. He clutched his phone tightly, almost nervously, before he pocketed it into his leather jacket. Wringing his wrists, he turned to look at Jisung and asked, “Do you have something I can write on?”

“I don’t bring stationery with me everywhere I go, unfortunately,” Jisung muttered as he rummaged through his pockets. He fished out a crumpled white napkin he’d nabbed from an eatery a few weeks ago. Or months. He couldn’t remember how long it’d been in there. Shrugging, he handed it over to the stranger. “Does this work?”

He gnawed at his bottom lip and nodded. He uncapped the pen in his hands and began scribbling something down on the napkin before he slid it over by Jisung’s leg. Then, he stood up from the porch, tucking the pen back into the front pocket of his jacket as he dusted off his jeans in a slow, deliberate manner, before he met Jisung’s eyes with a certain kind of frail courage.

“I’m Hyunjin.”

Jisung saw it, then. The somethingness other than intent in the voice of his eyes, in the hardened edges of his mouth, in the way he let his hands hang awkwardly by his side. He didn’t recognize it -- that somethingness unlike the rest. Jisung didn’t know what to make of it, but he knew it was the look of someone who did not lay hands upon skin as a pastime.

“Hyunjin,” Jisung pronounced slowly, testing the name that rolled off his tongue. As he looked down at the wobbly line of numbers written in glaring blue ink, he swallowed his own name back down his throat. Loneliness had made a coward out of him, after all. “It was nice to meet you.”

Hyunjin blinked at him in mild surprise before understanding settled in through the way his eyes shuttered. He stiffly nodded and wrenched open the door in an hasty effort to return inside the house and away from the porch -- away from Jisung and his roundabout rejection.

Left alone beneath the flickering porch light and the singing tremors of the trees, Jisung stared down at the napkin before he picked it up and tore it to tiny shreds. A gust of wind carried them across the porch and fluttered all over the grass like little butterflies. Jisung leaned against the handrail and took out another cigarette.

He’s never been much of a nice guy, anyway.

───

This was Jisung’s routine: he was a part-time custodian. He went to work four days a week from noon to night, scrubbing toilets and sinks and buffing each and every floor of the entire office building of some pharmaceutical company, and came home to his shared flat with Changbin smelling of bleach and ammonia after the moon had rose above the earth and kept him company with its borrowed light from the sun.

When he wasn’t working, he hardly ever left the apartment or the neighbourhood unless it was for a grocery run or to check the mail. Changbin thought it was sad, but Jisung didn’t. He thrived in solitude. He had his handful of people and places, and that was enough for him.

So he worked, he slept, he smoked, he stayed home. But the thing most people didn’t know about Jisung was that he was an architect too.

He built walls of paper-mache around his home. He slabbed layers of concrete and iron until the walls were impenetrable. He covered the windows in a film of gold behind white blinds in an attempt to mimic sunlight that’d lit the rooms inside aglow. He tended to a garden of spring flowers that did not grow, for its soil was made of soot, so he brought succulents inside and lined them up against the windowsill.

But his home was not clean. Handprints were imprinted on his furniture, on his walls, and he scrubbed at them to no avail when they wouldn’t come off. He tore couches apart and left scars across the hearth, and the sun would not shine even as he desperately shattered the flimsy glass of the windows and was faced with the gun-metal grey of the earth. Shadows encased the walls of his home and he sat there in the dark, rotting in the untouched corners of his room.

Sometimes, Jisung thought it was better to call his home a sepulcher instead. But there were people who did not take advantage of his trust and helped take care of his home -- like Changbin, who swept up the red-stained glass into a dustpan and cleaned the easier stains that only needed gentle hands. Chan, too, who replaced the blinds with sunflower curtains, and Minho, who righted the crooked frames of missing family photos.

Jisung watched them in awe, at times, and wondered how emptiness could feel so heavy yet look so light within their hands. He hadn’t let anyone into his home for a long, long time since he met them.

And he didn’t think he would for a long, long time, too.

“Holy hell, I am not living la vida loca. I feel like shit.”

Jisung mindlessly flipped through all the channels on their television as Changbin shuffled into the living room, rubbing his temples with his face screwed up in discomfort. His dark circles were like smudges of ash, and his jaw was stained with dried drool. Jisung barely looked at him as he landed on the food channel as his last resort. “You smell like shit too.”

That earned him a flicker on the shoulder. Jisung swatted Changbin’s hand away as the older grunted and went to grab himself a glass of water. While he chugged it down, he leaned his hip against the counter and asked, “Where’d you go last night? I couldn’t find you until you reeled me out of the bathtub. Actually, why was I in a bathtub in the first place?”

“I think you were trying to shower with your clothes but you were too drunk to even remember how to turn the knobs on, so you ended up pouring vodka down your pants,” Jisung said through a yawn. “And I didn’t do much. Just chilled by myself, you know, as per usual.”

Changbin rubbed a hand over his face. “Ugh. Vodka. But really? You didn’t talk to anyone? Not even, like, a single person? A simple hello?”

“Nope.”

“Will you ever socialize at the parties I bring you to?”

Jisung slunk in his seat and watched as the baker on television talk about gay bread. “Let’s face it, man. You only bring me because I’m the only one out of all your friends who doesn’t like to drink and it enables you to take a bunch of jello shots since I’ll be the one dragging your ass back home.”

“They’re good jello shots,” Changbin mumbled but didn’t deny it. He refilled his glass with water and took it with him to the couch, and sat beside Jisung. They watched the baking show in peaceful, mindless silence; the autumnal sunlight pooled through the windows of their apartment in a sea of pale gold.

If Jisung lived on his own, his apartment would have been dull. It was Changbin who made their apartment homey and warm, with photos of his family hung at every plausible space on the walls and cute dolls he’d collected as gifts and souvenirs he placed above every surface beside little perfume sachets disguised as drawstring pouches. It was nice to come back to after work when his clothes always smelled like cleaning agents.

When commercials came on, Changbin placed his cup on the coffee table and settled back in an angle that allowed him to look at Jisung with his back against the corner of the couch. “Hey.”

“Mhm.”

“I was thinking of going to work on a few things with Chan hyung since he rented out the music studio for the whole day.” Changbin shrugged, tugging at the collar of his t-shirt that has seen better days. “Wanna come?”

Jisung cushioned his cheek against his palm as he stared flatly at the television. “I’m not a student anymore.”

“Doesn’t matter. They’ll let you in if they know you’re with us.”

“I’ll pass,” he replied tersely, reaching over to grab the remote. He raised the volume until it drowned out Changbin’s voice when he attempted to change Jisung’s mind. Defeated, Changbin sighed and leaned back in his seat, waving at Jisung to turn it down before they could receive complaints from their more elderly neighbours.

Though the commercials have ended, Jisung didn’t pay attention. He picked at the skin peeling around his white-spotted nails, and ripped a thin strip off from the edges of his pinky nail. He watched it turn red and tender and accumulate blood within the shallow wound.

Amidst the blur of televised voices, Changbin asked him quietly, “Will you ever come back?”

“To school?”

“To us,” he corrected. “To music.”

Changbin may have only adorned the walls with family photos, but Jisung knew he kept photos of his friends on full display in his room -- of Jisung too, before he had been crumpled into a tiny, disillusioned thing like a foot to an old aluminum can. And Jisung knew that Changbin purposefully hid them away, so Jisung wouldn’t have to see the smile on his nineteen year old self that he couldn’t recognize anymore.

Another thing most people didn’t know about Jisung was that everyone believed in him too much to be a disappointment when he had the blood of one.

He had a few snarky responses in mind, but Jisung bit back the bitter blue down his throat. So, he opted to give Changbin an honest answer, because honesty was all he could give when he had nothing else of himself to offer. “I don’t know.”

With that, Changbin nodded, and he stood up from the couch. He wordlessly took his cup back to the kitchen and retreated to his room. After a while, Jisung could hear him shuffling towards the bathroom, and when the door clicked shut behind him and the water turned on, Jisung closed the television and went out to the balcony for a cigarette.

He watched the curlicues of smoke unfurl towards the clouds. He thought of blue ink and torn paper and red-rimmed eyes, and for a moment, Jisung wanted nothing more than to know what to do with the dead things they carried.

───

If the first time they met was by chance, then the second time was by accident.

Jisung was on an emergency grocery run after he and Changbin realized that the eggs they previously bought were already cracked and had leaked all over their fridge compartment. And since Changbin had too much on his plate to deal with pertaining to his projects, Jisung had valiantly volunteered to do the shopping, even if he was prone to buying all the bruised apples and never bothered to check the expiration dates on the milk.

After he inspected each individual egg closely and determined no leakiness, he placed the carton into his cart and wrenched it around to aim for the cereal aisle, only to end up slamming his cart against someone else’s when they had been approaching from his blind spot since his periphery was hindered by the hood he had over his head.

“Shit, sorry!” Jisung recoiled immediately. “That was my bad, I didn’t -- “

“Oh.” It was a soft, familiar voice. “It’s you.”

Jisung looked up from their carts to the face of the person he’d crashed into, and was met with the same eyes he'd seen almost a month ago -- the only difference being that those eyes were no longer red-rimmed but finely lined in brown. His black hair was tied up this time, revealing a trail of small gold studs and hoops, and he was a bit taller than Jisung had fleetingly imagined him to be. Hyunjin looked just as surprised to have run into him, pressing his lips together in a taut line that puckered his forehead, before his gaze flickered down to their carts.

“Well,” Jisung drawled, churning over possible ideas to get himself out of the situation. “This is kinda awkward, isn't it.”

Hyunjin didn’t seem to pay much mind to what he was saying. Instead, he narrowed his eyes on one of the many jumbo packs of assorted chocolates Jisung had piled into his cart, and said, “You’re going to die from all that processed sugar.”

He spoke as though they were long-time friends -- as though Jisung hadn’t declined his subtle advances back at the party, but Jisung could tell Hyunjin was still uncomfortable from the way he licked his cracked lips and fiddled with the chain of the cart. _I never know what to do with my hands._

“Nuh-uh. Highly unlikely. I’ve survived this long because God wouldn’t kill his funniest creation.”

Hyunjin opened his mouth but was interrupted by someone calling his name from behind him. Jisung didn’t want to do more painfully awkward socialization, so he snatched one of the large chocolate bags from his cart and carelessly tossed it among Hyunjin’s various bags of vitamins and protein powders. “Try them some time, if you want. Might make you sweeter on the inside.”

Then he quickly pulled his cart around and rushed over to self-checkout, his fingers itching for a smoke.

Carrying his groceries out of the market, Jisung stood off to the side underneath the timber roofed walkway and placed the bags down. He crouched down into a squat and reached for his pack and lighter. As he lit up a cigarette, he rested his arms atop his knees and looked up at the sky covered in soft clouds and streaks of contrails that carried over the endless dome of blue. It was the same shade of blue as his step-dad’s duvet -- the one he used to wrap around Jisung’s shoulders whenever it rained.

He couldn’t forget it. The blue had been so bright and warm in his eyes.

Jisung glanced to the side at the sound of the automatic doors sliding open. There was Hyunjin, taking long-legged strides towards the parking lot with the accompaniment of his teal-haired friend. They weren’t too far ahead, and that’s when he saw the yellow pack of chocolates peeking out from one of the bags Hyunjin carried.

He didn’t know what to think about that. Jisung watched their receding, lithe figures disappear behind the rows of parked vehicles, and did not move even as his cigarette had burned down to the size of a thumb tack. Time moved forward in a thick, slow stream, like molasses that settled deep into the crevices of his bones.

When the sky developed a darker burnish to it, Jisung finally got up and flicked the cigarette bud into the garbage. He picked up his groceries and trudged down the parking lot, following the trail of lingering ghosts that have long dissolved into the diluted, blue current.

When Jisung got home, he cracked open an egg and was greeted with two yolks.

He stared at it with disinterest and a mild twinge in his chest, but Changbin curiously peeked over his shoulder and let out a sound of awe.

"What does that mean again?" he asked.

Jisung shrugged. "Beats me."

“Dude. Did you just make a pun?”

“No.”

Changbin hummed and snapped a photo of the small phenomenon. Jisung waited until Changbin shuffled out of the kitchen before he began to slowly whisk the eggs with a pair of chopsticks.

The first time he saw a double yolk egg was during the time he helped his step-dad clumsily navigate through a homemade dumpling recipe. Past the piling dishes in the sink and the fine powder of flour scattered all over the counter, sunlight sifted through their plaid curtains and beamed above their laughing heads. When Jisung cracked open an egg and two yolks had spilled out from its shells, his dad swept him off his feet and declared Jisung the luckiest boy to walk on planet earth.

 _It means something good will happen to you_ , he had said, _at any moment now, or tomorrow, or in a month, or even years later._

That was the last time he’d ever seen a double yolk egg, until today.

He beat the yolks until they were the right texture. The colour of them suddenly reminded him of gold earrings and chewed up lips. Unsettled, Jisung beat the eggs again, hoping to beat the memory out of his head too.

───

Jisung let the days go by.

Time dissolved itself into a shapeless form. On the day he arrived home after he was done with a rare morning shift, Changbin had flooded his phone with an influx of frantic messages pleading Jisung to help bring his CD to campus when he had forgotten to put it in his bag. There was less than an hour left before Changbin’s scheduled appointment with his professor. The commute to campus was at least an hour on transit if one excluded traffic -- half an hour if by car.

Jisung had clicked his tongue out of vexation, begrudged at the fact he would have to postpone his long-needed nap, but he snatched the CD left at their kitchen counter and got behind the wheel anyway.

Apprehension niggled at the back of his head as he paid for parking and sped across the lot to reach the sidewalk when he arrived. The jacaranda trees still towered over him with their drapes of violet blossoms as he walked down the familiar path he often took as a student to get to the music building.

It was the first time in months since he’d stepped foot onto campus. Things have changed and people have left. Being here again, knowing that he could never go back to being eighteen or nineteen again was something he couldn’t understand; to return physically to a place full of memories and dreams but as an older, different person.

It felt nostalgic, but then again -- nostalgia was a dirty liar insisting that things were better than they seemed.

Approaching the music building, Jisung immediately recognized Changbin by the black and yellow jacket he wore that made him look like a cloddish bumble bee. He hopped over the pebblestone steps and shouted his name. Changbin whipped his head up and looked like he was on the verge of tears from pure, unfiltered gratitude.

“Dude, I owe you so fucking much. Thank the heavens for your drivers’ license,” Changbin rejoiced in relief as he took the CD and brought it close to his chest.

“Oh, yeah. Okay. Thank the license, not the actual driver.”

Changbin sniggered, but then he scanned Jisung from head to toe and squinted at his outfit. “Aren’t you cold? You’ll catch something from just wearing that.”

The top part of his work coveralls had been tied around his waist, revealing his sweaty tank top. Jisung hadn’t bothered to rewear it properly after he’d gotten off work and was tasked with an urgent delivery. “You think I wanted to come here smelling like garbage and chemicals while looking like a plumber? I didn’t have time to change. Anyway, so can I leave now?”

“No, wait! Give me a ride after I’m done. _Please_ ,” Changbin whined shrilly, and Jisung didn’t bother to hide his anguish. “Seriously, I can't take it anymore! I hate taking the bus. I almost fell on a granny’s lap today because the bus driver was going over the speed limit and suddenly braked in the middle of the fucking highway because he sneezed. _Sneezed_. Besides, my appointment won’t take that long. You can, like, chill at a café or something.”

“Campus security is gonna kick me out.”

“And campus security lets old ladies do tai chi by the fountain,” Changbin replied, waving away the concern. “You’ll be fine.”

Instead of a cafe, Jisung ended up tucking himself into a neglected corner at the back of a library near the parking lot. He sat on his haunches, leaning his back against the brick wall with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He mindlessly scrolled through social media on his phone before he decided to entertain himself for the next hour by watching a documentary on orangutans. But even then, he found it hard to focus when his stomach wouldn’t stop rumbling. He had naps for lunch and it was thanks to Changbin that Jisung couldn’t get either.

He pocketed his phone and leaned his head back, tilting his head up to look at the sky. Jisung tried to make shapes out of the formless clouds but it didn’t serve much as a successful distraction when all he could think about was going home.

He closed his eyes and heaved out a sigh, but it wasn’t long until a shadow fell over him that he opened his eyes again.

This was when they met a third time.

“I was beginning to wonder if you even went to school here.”

Hyunjin stood in front of him, blocking the sunlight with his figure engulfed in baggy clothing. He looked calmer this time from the way his poise indicated more self-assurance. His mask was tugged down to his chin and half of his face was eclipsed by the shadows of his hat. A bag was slung over his shoulder. His earrings were silver today.

Jisung inhaled too sharply and ended up coughing into a fist. Once he recovered, he stubbed out his cigarette against the ground and countered, “I don’t, but I’m beginning to think you’re following me.”

“Don’t think so highly of yourself,” he scoffed. Hyunjin left an arm’s length of distance between them when he squatted down beside Jisung, leaning his arms above his knees to cushion his chin. His eyes dipped down to Jisung’s bare arms before flickering to the parking lot ahead. “I got dropped off here and saw you.”

“Couldn’t stop yourself from approaching a smoking hot lad, could you? Well, I must say I’m flattered."

Hyunjin was unfazed at the boasting, as though he consciously ignored everything that came out of Jisung’s mouth. He looked rather thoughtful as he played with his necklace. “You know, I think we have mutual friends.”

Jisung stared at him. “What?”

It turned out that Hyunjin knew a Seungmin and a Jeongin who knew a Felix who, of course, knew Chan. Jisung recognized none of those names except for Felix, because Jisung had seen him a few times before -- the freckled boy Chan often mentioned in passing disguised as an afterthought when it was clearly more than that.

Chan’s popularity was universal knowledge. But when Hyunjin divulged that he had seen Chan’s wallpaper of him and Changbin, and that Chan had prattled on non-stop about them both, that was when Jisung realized that Chan’s chattiness did not help when it came to wanting to remain unknown.

Jisung ran a hand through his greasy hair, trying to hide his displeasure. But then he slanted Hyunjin a mildly perturbed glance when he came to realize the intent behind bringing up their mutual friends. “Well, hey. You do know that just because we have mutual friends, it doesn’t mean that we need to be friends, right?”

At that, Hyunjin looked like a deer caught in the headlights. His hands that had been running the daisy charm of his necklace back and forth through the chain traveled down to wring his wrists. “Why not?”

“I’m pretty sure you know why.”

“No I don’t.”

“Then think harder, _Hyunjin_.”

Hyunjin chewed at his bottom lip. His face turned a bit red. “Okay, fine. Then know this: I don’t care if you turned me down. I’m not -- if that’s what you’re bothered about, then I’ll tell you right now that I’m not interested anymore. You were just _nice_ , that’s all. I won't make this awkward if you won't. Plus, since we have friends who are friends with each other, I thought we could be friends too. It’d be cool, wouldn’t it? Don’t you want that?”

“I don’t want anything,” Jisung said promptly -- instinctively.

Hyunjin’s shoulders shook with a soft, almost scornful, chuckle. “And I don’t believe that. Everybody always wants something.”

“I’m not everybody," he bit back.

Jisung had stopped wanting a long time ago, but maybe that was human nature -- to want so selfishly that if you were to be deprived of such an intrinsic instinct, you were anything but human. Maybe that was what Jisung had been reduced to: a nothing but something pretending to be human. All blue and bones and searching eyes, never reaching the light.

Jisung fished out his pack to light up another cigarette -- mostly for a sense of steadiness and to give his hands something to do. He drew smoke to his lungs in a long, deep drag, and managed a deadpan expression when Hyunjin reached over to pluck the cigarette out from his fingers. Jisung watched him with a severe lack of amusement, but as soon as Hyunjin put the cigarette to his own gnawed lips, Jisung tore his eyes away.

They were quiet. Trees rustled in faint echoes and cars drove by storm drains that ricocheted with a loud clunk. Jisung watched the clouds drift like aimless travelers. Hyunjin tucked his black hair behind an ear and held out the cigarette for him to take back. But the act itself seemed like a question for Jisung -- a question of acceptance. Jisung couldn’t fathom why, but he was curious. He hadn’t been curious for so long.

“I’m not easy to be friends with. I like to piss people off on purpose.”

“Okay,” Hyunjin drawled in genuine confusion. “I don’t see why that’d be a problem. We might get along since I’ve been told I have an infuriating effect on people.”

“What’s your favourite colour.”

Hyunjin blinked owlishly at the sudden question. He licked his lips and answered, "Blue."

Jisung hummed. He took the cigarette from him, careful to not let their fingers touch, and inhaled shallow drag before offering it back. “Me too.”

Hyunjin didn’t say anything, too busy staring at Jisung’s profile as if the curve of his nose or the shape of his lips were something he could use to decrypt the framework of which Jisung’s heart was built upon. But it didn’t take long for him to understand the implication. His mouth slowly lifted into a boyish smile. There was a twinkle in his eye and a barely noticeable shyness to his hands as he hid them in the long sleeves of his crewneck.

It was there again, in his eyes. That strange, inexplicable somethingness; a sort of deep blue that could only be found in pure water. Jisung wondered distantly if this would be more troublesome than he thought.

And so, they sat there together sharing a single cigarette -- an uncomfortable friendship filled with silent conversation and a chasm filled with the unsaid.

───

Jisung didn’t really run into him anymore, after that. He worked and slept most of the days away with his head in a pool of moonlight, and his mouth was often sticky with root beer floats he ordered from the diner he frequented to for his lunch breaks. It was quiet and uneventful, just as Jisung liked it.

He woke up earlier than usual, one day, when the earth was at its bluest depths. His body felt like cotton, netted in his diaphragm; there was a fist in his mouth prying him open to find what went to bed and never woke up inside him. He wished he could wash the whole feeling off of him.

There was a light knock on his door. Jisung sat up in his bed, carding his fingers through his hair to unknot the tangles, before his door creaked open and Changbin poked his head in.

"Wow. You’re up early. Maybe God _is_ real,” he said, impressed. “Well, since you’re awake, can you help Ms. Kang with her groceries later? She asked me but I have work right now.”

Jisung nodded and threw a lopsided thumbs up.

“You’ve got mail, too.” Changbin held up an envelope. “Here, I’ll just put it on top of your drawer. By the way, Chan hyung’s coming for dinner tonight, so try not to, like -- I dunno. Take a six hour nap before then? I think he might be bringing a few friends over. Anyway, I’ll see you later. Don’t forget about Ms. Kang!”

Changbin stuck his tongue out at him before slipping out of his room. Belatedly, Jisung stuck out his middle finger.

Once he heard their door open and close, Jisung swung his legs around the bed and shuffled towards his drawer. He picked the letter up and ran a thumb over the familiar sender scrawled across the middle of the envelope, before leaving it to open for later. He grabbed his towel and headed to the bathroom for a quick shower.

Ms. Kang was their friendly neighbour who lived alone with two cats. She was a quaint old lady who fed them on days she cooked too much food for one, which was rather often. Changbin had called it an overestimation of hunger, but Jisung had called it muscle memory instead. Ms. Kang bought too many groceries for her feeble arms to hold and talked fondly of her children all the time; she must still think they would come home for dinner, one day.

It was nearing afternoon by the time Jisung returned to his flat after helping Ms. Kang carry her groceries to her unit. She thanked him by gently patting his cheek. Her back had looked so small when she closed the door behind her.

The perfume sachet of jasmine filled his nostrils. The sunlight reflected off of the cold tea Changbin had left on the coffee table.

Jisung went to his room and shut the door. He picked up the letter and sat at the edge of his bed and opened the envelope. Inside was written with the same, perfunctory content, such as asking Jisung how he was and how school was going. Jisung languidly skimmed everything else until he reached the end where an addendum had been scribbled in blue ink amongst the lines of faded black.

_I am beginning to forget things, but I keep the photo of you posing with those silken Galápagos sea lions during our trip to the aquarium beneath my pillow as a reference point, and try to imagine how much you’ve grown since then._

_Know that I hope you still wake up everyday and open wide for the sun._

The blue ink seeped trough his fingertips. He could feel it; the corners of his home were molding. Ivy moss curled around the windows that hung fifty yards of gold theatrical silk and it was just him, dirty linen, and an ache he could not unlearn the feeling of -- that sodden mess of dirty laundry pressing against his ribcage.

For a moment, Jisung thought this was all just a bad dream. The world was quiet enough for him to feel like a kid again. He could find the tender spot where time was at its most vulnerable state and he could touch it, tear it apart, scoop out its blue lozenges, and then find himself waking up on his step-dad’s chest after crawling into his arms from a bad dream. It was summer in their low-ceiling house that smelled of mothballs and cheap cologne.

There, the song of cicadas. There, from the television, a laugh track. There, the warm, beer-stained breaths. There, his heart was not aching on the floor.

Instead of putting it among the yellowed sea of ripped open letters underneath his bed, he clutched the letter close to his chest as he laid down and pulled the blanket over his head. Jisung stared at those words until he closed his eyes and pretended he was back in one of the many houses he grew up in -- that it was just him, his step-dad, and their blue duvet.

He woke up to sounds of laughter.

Jisung blinked away the fog from his eyes and reluctantly tossed aside the blanket. Goosebumps immediately rose on his skin; slowly, he sat up and began to work out the crick in his neck. It was dark, save for a cove of light that leaked through his door. He looked down at the letter in his hand that had crumpled horribly in his sleep and he tried to flatten it out against his lap.

Scratching his stomach, he went to open the door and squinted at his harsh reencounter with the lights. Simultaneously, someone who’d been walking down the hall stopped in the middle of their tracks out of surprise. When his eyes finally adjusted to the brightness, Jisung realized that the person gaping at him was none other than Hyunjin.

“Oh, come _on_ ,” Hyunjin complained.

Jisung was glad, to say the least, that they felt the same way.

“I think the universe wants me to think you’re my stalker _and_ secret admirer. I'm really flattered, actually.” He ignored Hyunjin’s sputtering protests and shrugged. "Didn’t think you were one of the friends Chan hyung was gonna bring though. It’s usually just him and sometimes Felix. And what’s with the whole get up?”

Hyunjin blinked and looked down at himself. Jisung was referring mostly to his face, since he noticed the glitter and rhinestones underneath his intricately drawn eyes when the lights faintly reflected off of it; Hyunjin’s clothes were casual, but his makeup with all that blue and gold gradient shimmer seemed a bit too theatrical for such a plain outfit. It was a funny dichotomy.

“I had rehearsal. I didn’t have time to take the makeup off,” Hyunjin said, self-consciously tapping a finger to his pearl-dusted cheekbone.

“Rehearsal?”

“The musical I’m in premiers soon, so we’ve been having to rehearse with everything on,” Hyunjin explained. “I didn’t even know you were Changbin hyung’s roommate. I accepted Chan hyung’s invitation to dinner because it’s been a while since I’ve hung out with -- anyone, really. I’m always busy with practice so I tend to forget about everything else.”

Jisung tilted his head, studying the expression on Hyunjin’s face. He could see it, now, why performing arts would fit somebody with his disposition. There was a warm glow to his eyes akin to the passion Jisung had once cradled in his palms. “You’re the same as them, then.”

That earned him a small, confused look, but Jisung jutted his chin towards the living room. They fell in step beside each other towards the source of mingled laughter. He wondered what Changbin would say. He’d probably cry if he knew Jisung made a new friend behind his back.

“What do we say? They might ask how we know each other,” Hyunjin whispered.

“Well. We could be honest. I could say that I was the asshole who turned you down right after you finished bawling your eyes out.”

“I wasn’t _bawling_ my eyes out.”

“Fine. You were just cleaning your eyes so you could have a better view of the handsome guy sitting beside you.”

Hyunjin’s brows bumped together in a scowl. “I regret giving you my number.”

“Don’t be.” Jisung almost laughed. “I didn’t have use for it anyway.”

When they arrived at the living room, Chan’s face had lit up in delight at the sight of Jisung and he leapt up from the stool he was sitting on. He bounded towards Jisung with open arms, grabbed him by the shoulders, and crushed him against his chest. “It feels like it’s been forever since I’ve last seen you!”

“You saw me last week,” he wheezed into his right ear. When Felix caught his eye and waved at him with bright-eyed enthusiasm, Jisung managed a tiny smile reserved just for him.

“We saved food for you, by the way. It’s in the fridge. Did you sleep the entire time?” Changbin asked incredulously, then squawked when Felix snatched the remote out of his hands to turn the channel of the television. “I banged on your door for legit five minutes. One day you’re gonna sleep through an entire fire, man, and it won’t be my fault when you get barbequed to death.”

Chan drew back from the hug, grinning ear-to-ear with pink cheeks, before he noticed Hyunjin standing off to the side fiddling with his necklace. “Oh, I take it that you two have already met. Hyunjin, did you end up finding the bathroom?”

“Um. I got distracted, so I’m going to go do that again, actually,” Hyunjin said before he sped off to the bathroom. Chan blinked at the abrupt departure and looked at Jisung in question. Jisung merely shrugged in response.

“Anyway, this is Jeongin -- “ Changbin reached over to slap at the shoulder of a younger boy with bright, teal hair, whom Jisung recognized to be the friend from the grocery run. “Little twerp can’t even differentiate between regular pine needles and spicy pine needles.”

Jeongin shrieked, “Rosemary _are_ spicy pine needles!”

“No they aren’t, and I’ll prove it by eating every needle-like leaf I can find by walking through a forest.”

“What if you eat a yew leaf, dumbass?”

“The fuck is a yew leaf?”

“Pine needles are distinguished by the presence of a sheath-like structure at the base of the leaf, almost always holding bundles of two or more leaves. Yews don't have the sheath thing,” Jisung piped up indifferently. “Also, rosemary is poisonous in large quantities. Rosemary is up to 0.5% camphor by weight so 400 grams of rosemary contains up to 2 grams of camphor, which is seriously toxic. You will die.”

“I love your brain stockpiling all that useless shit,” Changbin sighed dreamily. “I love that shit so much."

Meanwhile, Chan had already gravitated towards Felix, focused on his facial expressions and hands as they moved swiftly to translate the current rapid-fire discussion. Chan’s eyes widened in understanding and he turned around to frantically announce, “Nobody is allowed to travel to forests in the middle of the night just to eat random leaves, okay? I swear to Ave Maria I’ll ground all of you if you don’t do something more productive.”

Changbin plucked the remote out of Felix’s grasp and changed the channel to an adult network that had most of them shouting. “You want something more productive? Fine by me. I’ll use Excel _and_ the toilet.” He wiggled his fingers. “ _Spreadcheeks_.”

“Okay, we’re kicking you out of your own turf. Come on.” Chan pulled at Changbin’s arm but Changbin remained stubbornly glued to his seat as he erupted into drunk giggles.

“This is why you’re single, hyung,” Jeongin said, snatching the remote to turn the channel to a less obscene network. “Meanwhile, I’m single because I’m in a committed relationship with the Duolingo owl. I currently have a 200 streak with it.”

Chan narrowed his eyes at him. “You -- you’re in love with an owl? Are you a furry?”

“Damn. Speaking of relationships, it's sad Jisungie couldn't meet Seungmin. He and Hyunjin are still kinda weird after they -- _ow_!” Changbin yelped when Felix jabbed him in the side with a sharp elbow. “What was that for? It’s not like it's a secret anymore. Guys, come on. They broke up, like, months ago, and in my opinion, I saw it coming ever since Seungmin's inju -- _ow!_ Felix, can you stop fucking hitting me? Have I been reduced to just a punching bag for you? Is that what I am to you, now?"

Felix rolled his eyes and pointed at his forehead before tapping his fists together. Chan laughed -- a bright, rough sound, and Changbin plaintively demanded to be told what that meant. Jeongin ruffled Felix’s hair and encouraged him to insult Changbin more while he took out his phone to record the entire ordeal.

Jisung was more amused at the fact Changbin wanted to introduce him to his friends who were in the middle of a highly uncomfortable transition of their lives. But he supposed it explained things a bit more.

“I'm going to go eat,” he said, though his words went unheard when everyone began ganging up on his poor roommate. Jisung shrugged and turned around.

He didn’t go to the kitchen. Instead, he headed back to his room to grab his jacket and shuffled back to the hall. The rest of them were now fighting over the remote control while knocking over empty bottles of beers, so Jisung quietly made his way to the balcony and slid the doors shut behind him. Almost immediately, he felt the tension drain from his body, and he sucked in the cold, fresh air as he relished in the quiet.

He leaned against the railing and lit up a cigarette. After a drag, he let it hang immobile in his mouth. The stars looked like snowflakes in the night sky that remained still like a photograph. Jisung shivered at a passing wind and zipped his jacket up to his chin.

Then, he heard the door slide open. He didn't have to look to know who it was. When Hyunjin settled beside him, Jisung offered the cigarette without sparing him a glance -- though he did watch from the corner of his eye as Hyunjin took in a slow, deep drag.

“Performers shouldn’t smoke,” Jisung said.

“I only do it in moderation, unlike you,” he retorted lightly, handing the cigarette back. “They’re rowdy tonight. I came back to them telling Changbin hyung to take off his clothes. I also think someone threw up, but I don't know who it was because no one would admit it. So, um. There’s vomit on your carpet now.”

Jisung pinched the bridge of his nose. “Why aren’t you in there drinking with them?”

Hyunjin pulled at the dried skin on his lips. Jisung fought off the urge to swat his hand away. “I’ve been sober for a few years now.”

“Ah.”

“What about you?”

Jisung thought about his step-dad popping open a beer during the late summer evenings. His breath would smell like malt when he pressed a kiss to Jisung’s forehead and tucked him to bed. Then, the next morning, Jisung would pick up all the empty cans that had doubled in amount during the time he’d been asleep, rinse away the dredges of beer, and toss them into the recycling bin in their backyard. The brand had been blue and silver.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly, bringing the cigarette to his mouth. “I think I may have issues.”

Much to his surprise, Hyunjin laughed. It was a sound that reminded him of ripples in a still pond after a stone had been thrown in, high-pitched and sweet. With a slight frown, Jisung blew a plume of smoke at him, making Hyunjin cough and stutter in his laughter as he waved away the haze.

“What’s so funny?”

“You, when you’re not being narcissistic.”

“Yeah, okay. Laugh at my pain then, asshole. Since we’re on the topic of issues, what’s the issue between you and your friend?”

Hyunjin frowned. “Which friend?”

“The one you broke up with.” Jisung exhaled and let Hyunjin take the cigarette from his fingers. “They mentioned it briefly. Is that why you were crying that night?”

Jisung watched closely as the muscles in Hyunjin’s face tightened. He stood with stiff shoulders and faraway eyes, and when he began to gnaw relentlessly at his bottom lip, Jisung snatched his sleeve and tugged his hand away.

“You’re bleeding,” he said, then let go.

Hyunjin blinked at him. His eyes flitted to the side and he licked his lips. His voice was quiet. “No. I mean, it was related to it, but not really.”

Jisung looked down at the moon-bleached sidewalk of his apartment, where the moonlight glinted against the dewy grass so that it sparkled like a field of stars below the balcony.

He wondered if he would have been a rebound, then, if he had chosen to accept Hyunjin’s elusive advances that night; if anything would have changed from pocketing his number rather than ripping it into pieces; if such a gesture suggested something beyond human connection.

If he weren’t the person he was now, if he were less disillusioned and a little bit more optimistic -- would he have done the same? But it was futile to think such things when it all boiled down to this: Han Jisung was not used to being loved. He wouldn’t know what to do at all.

“Did they say anything else?” Hyunjin asked. “About us, I mean.”

When Hyunjin handed him back the cigarette, Jisung stared at the ring of speckled red around the end before he tucked it back in between Hyunjin’s lips, careful to not touch them with his fingertips, and ignored the way Hyunjin stared wide-eyed at him. “Nah. Felix just called Changbin hyung an idiot.”

“Oh,” he said quietly. A small gust of wind carried strands of his hair away from where it’d been tucked behind his ear. His cheeks were tinted a faint peach against the moon’s backdrop, though Jisung couldn’t tell if it was the makeup or not. “It wasn’t a big deal. The breakup, I mean. We're still friends. It just, you know. It takes a while, but we’ll be back to normal in no time.”

“You really believe that?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it sounds more like you’re just trying to convince yourself. You could wish for it to come back everyday but that’s the thing. If you’re wishing for it, then that means _normal_ is already in the past. It won’t come back. It never will.”

Hyunjin scoffed bit. "But normal doesn’t have to look the same. Maybe our normal will be better than before.”

Jisung stubbed out his cigarette against the ashtray. He felt inexplicably annoyed. “You’re so naive.”

“And you’re so cynical,” Hyunjin shot back. “What made you wear that chip on your shoulder?”

“None of your business,” he said, then turned around and went back inside.

They didn’t talk anymore, after that. The rest of the night was mostly Jisung and Felix cleaning up the vomit stain on his carpet. Hyunjin re-mingled with the group, though his eyes strayed often. Nearing after midnight, he watched as Felix heaved Chan by his waist and effortlessly carried him out the door despite his thinner frame in comparison, while Hyunjin piggybacked Jeongin and nearly knocked over the picture frames.

Outside in the hall, Hyunjin glanced over his shoulder. Jisung merely saluted and closed the door before Hyunjin had the opportunity to say or do anything.

He went to find Changbin, who was sitting down on the couch with stains on his shirt while blinking blearily at the television. He was staring at the screen with glazed eyes and Jisung waved a hand in front of them.

“Hey, time to get you into bed,” said Jisung, pulling at Changbin’s arm. When Changbin resisted, he sighed and fell down onto the seat beside him. “Don’t you want to pass out in your room instead?”

Changbin burped and squished his cheek against the couch. “No.”

Jisung wrinkled his nose. “Ugh. I feel like such a dad sometimes, and that’s super weird, because you’re the one who’s older.”

“Dad,” Changbin mumbled, eyes fluttering close. “Dad. Huh. Dad. _Dad_? Your dad. Hey. Are they from your dad?”

“What is?”

“The letters.”

Jisung blinked. He brushed off a strand of hair from Changbin’s black t-shirt. “Maybe.”

“Oh. Okay. Yeah, okay. I kinda knew it. Always the same place. Same name.” He was red in the face and his hair was mussed from play fighting with the others earlier. “Is he -- the reason why? You know. Why you stopped. Stopped everything. Just stopped.”

"I don't know." He rested his cheek against the couch so he mirrored Changbin. “I guess you could say that.”

“Do you miss him?”

Jisung would have smiled in irony if it weren’t for the fact there was a phantom hand wrapped around his throat. “I think I kinda just miss everything.”

Changbin nodded slowly. He started to doze off, mouth flopping open and closed, and began snoring after a while. Jisung watched him sleep peacefully for a moment. Then, he went into his room to grab a blanket. He draped it over Changbin and helped the latter lie down in a more comfortable position before tucking him in.

Jisung studied the state of the living room before deciding he’d leave it for Changbin to clean when he wakes up. Jisung quickly went to the toilet to relieve himself before retiring to his room again after closing all the lights.

He let the tension ebb away into the night. He laid on his bed and stared up at a crack on the ceiling that spilled threads of light if he imagined it hard enough.

When he was alone, his step-dad was there too. He was in the air pouring in from opened windows, peeking from every shadow. He was in every story told, every picture drawn. He lurked in the pauses, the spaces. But most of all, he lurked in the absence of words -- in the silence that mothered him since childhood.

Everywhere he looked, everywhere he went -- memories lingered in the fissures of the blue world that hung around him like an infinite drape. Jisung thought of the blue duvet, the blue tourniquet, the blue skies that kissed their faces with light rain as he and his step-dad ran across the fields and through the puddles; the deep blue of his step-dad’s smile that never reached his eyes.

But then, suddenly, he saw the blue of Hyunjin’s eyes -- the shimmer that fell from his eyelids and onto his collarbones. The blue of his hands, when they were cold and chapped in the wind. The blue of his earrings, when they glinted against the light at a certain angle. The blue of his clothes that matched well on his sun-mottled skin. He wore an unbearable light that had Jisung covering his face with his hands.

Irritated, Jisung rolled over to his side and pulled the blanket over his head. He willed the images of Hyunjin to vanish and shut his eyes, hoping for a dreamless sleep.


	2. punchdrunk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: drinking, implied past underage drinking (not sure if there's anything else? please let me know if there is!)
> 
> ALSO when "dad" is just used, jisung is still referring to his step-dad and not his biological dad. his biological dad is never mentioned, so when i leave the "step" out, it's still referring to his step-dad. ^__^

Changbin gave off the impression of a silly person, but Jisung knew it was always for the sake of comedy. Underneath that easy-to-tease veneer was a sharp eye and someone who knew more than he let on.

So he should have seen it coming, really, when Changbin shuffled into the kitchen the morning after their little get-together. He refilled the kettle and set it on the stove for it to boil before he took a seat at the table across from Jisung, who was stuffing his mouth with cereal while scrolling through the news on his phone.

Jisung glanced up, pausing in the middle of bringing his spoon to his mouth, when he noticed Changbin staring at him in intense concentration. Jisung brought his spoon down and asked, “Can I help you?”

"It has come to my attention -- via our group chat -- that you and Hyunjin knew each other way before yesterday,” he began slowly, narrowing his eyes. “And you didn’t tell me? You said you socialized with _nobody_ at Wooyoung’s party!”

Jisung slurped his milk loudly. “Oops. Little ol’ me forgot. My bad.”

He assumed it was Hyunjin who balked and gave up the info. Jisung had already left the group chat the moment it was created. Changbin didn’t look like he remembered their little chat on the couch either, and Jisung silently thanked the universe for omitting the chance to be confronted about it. The least he wanted to do in the morning was to talk about his issues.

Changbin reached forward to smack him on the arm, though Jisung moved away in time to avoid it. Jisung sighed and leaned on his elbows. “Dude, it’s not such a big deal. He was crying, so I talked to him a bit. And then, uh -- yeah. We met accidentally after that. Then it turns out that everybody knew each other and blah blah. You get the picture.”

“He was crying?” Changbin asked, puzzled.

“Yeah. He said it was related to his break up with what’s-his-name.”

“Shit, man.” Changbin let out a low whistle, leaning back in his chair with folded arms. “Wanna know why they broke up?”

“No, and I don’t want to hear -- “

“When you get consecutively stood up at dinners for months because your boyfriend’s too busy to even remember about the reservations, then promises to show up next time only to never live up to his word? It gets pretty tiring. Seungmin’s a nice guy and he’s always been understanding about Hyunjin’s tunnel vision, but then Seungmin got injured and things just -- _changed_. On one hand, there’s a guy really passionate about his craft. On the other hand, there’s a guy who is no longer physically capable of continuing his craft. That's like a breeding ground for unhealthy jealousy."

Jisung sighed through his nose. “What does that mean?”

"Seungmin needed Hyunjin to be there, to choose him for once," Changbin said, getting up from his seat to take the kettle off the stove once it began to release steam. He grabbed his mug from the cupboards and took out a tea bag. "Then, I think Seungmin finally realized he will and _is_ always going to be an afterthought. Hyunjin loves his work too much to let another pair of hands bring him down.”

Jisung spooned up the rest of his soggy cereal into his mouth. He wished he slept in so he could have avoided this conversation. “You say that as if it’s a bad thing.”

“I mean, not really, but wouldn’t you want to be someone’s number one above everything else?”

“I don’t want anything,” he curtly clarified. “And I don’t care. You wouldn’t make someone you care about give up something they love -- not for anything. Not for anyone.”

Changbin leaned his hip against the counter, studying Jisung quietly. Changbin had a natural, hawkish gaze. Maybe that was why Jisung was scared of him, sometimes. Changbin didn’t linger in the blue of the past like Jisung did. Changbin could see straight through him and wouldn’t beat around the bush with it. He was earnest to the core and grappled his fears like they were specks of dust unrivaled to his human constitution. He was a weathered temple that stayed standing despite all the disaster and destruction.

He nodded slowly, tapping his finger against his arm. “I think you two will get along.”

“What?”

Changbin shrugged. “I mean, I’m just saying. I haven’t seen you engage with someone new since -- you know. Since then. It’s bizarre but also really nice.”

“It’s not nice for _me_. He’s vexing. He’s too naive.”

“He challenges you, then, because you’re not that great either,” Changbin laughed, and his eyes softened. “You’ve become pessimistic, unlike the first time I met you.”

Jisung didn’t like where the direction of the conversation had gone. He looked down at the cereal crumbs drifting among his bowl of milk. He bit the tip of his spoon. “People change.”

“They do, don’t they,” Changbin hummed, bringing his mug to the table. “But yeah. Now that they’ve separated, it’s caused a wedge between all of us. We were told it wasn’t messy, but I can detect bullshit from a mile away. Now, I’ll give Seungmin the leeway considering he’s still in the middle of recovering, but Hyunjin? He just won’t talk.”

Jisung recalled the way Hyunjin held onto the daisy charm of his necklace; the longing, the regret, the memory of ash on his blue-laden face. "I’m sure you can find a way to make him,” he said. “He’s a non-stop chatterbox.”

Changbin slanted him an amused look. “Oh, really? Do _you_ want to talk to him about it, then?”

“No thanks.” Jisung picked up his bowl and brought it to the sink. He left it for Changbin to wash and began making his way back to his room. “Remember to clean up the living room!”

He ignored Changbin’s wails of complaint and shut the door behind him.

───

When he was eleven, they moved into a boarding house.

It was one of those crummy cheap places that reeked of death and decay his step-dad could only afford after they got evicted from their house because of the overdue mortgage payment. They left behind curio cupboards of his mother’s memory and shared a single bed in their small room while living with four other tenants. Jisung could still remember which one of them had offered him a cigarette with their sallow teeth and putty cheeks.

But Jisung pretended that it was a normal kind of situation, that there was nothing wrong with wearing the same unwashed uniform for weeks, that sometimes he’d have to search for abandoned coins in the alleyways to buy himself a warm pork bun from the convenience store for lunch. It was his new normal, and he’d learned to accept that. As long as he had his dad, he would be okay, and he would grow up to be okay too.

One night, as Jisung stared up at the black remnants of soot tags in the corner of the ceiling, his dad sat up from his recline and reached over to grab his bottle from the nightstand. He only drank during nighttime to avoid raising suspicion from the other tenants in case they reported the habit to the landlord. His step-dad was a good liar.

“You awake, buddy?”

Jisung hummed.

“Listen to me, son,” his dad murmured, tipping the bottle back. Liquid clunked against the blue glass. “Some day, you’re gonna be all alone. Everyone thinks that’s the scariest thing in the world, but it’s not. You should never be afraid of being alone because there’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s _people_ you should be scared of.”

Jisung looked up at him, curious. “People?”

“People,” he affirmed. “They’ll tell you what to do, how to feel -- then, before you know it, you’re pouring your life out in search of something other people told you to go search for.” He shook his head with a little scoff, his eyes glazed over at the strip of sallow moonlight slashed across the wall. “One day you’re gonna be all alone, Hannie, so you need to know how to take care of yourself.”

Maybe that was when everything went wrong. Or maybe it was the time he asked Jisung to play for him one, last time with his childhood guitar -- the pleads of a dead man.

Jisung never knew for certain. If he did, he wanted everything to be his fault so he could fix it, but he didn’t. He might never will.

Someone jostled against his elbow and he flinched back into the present. Jisung blinked at the jars of honey citron tea he’d been staring at for a good while now, in the e-mart Changbin had told him to buy his list of things from. He looked at the prices and ran his fingernails down the denim fabric of his jeans. He closed his eyes to the hum of open freezers and muddled voices.

“Get the Nokchawon one,” someone said. “It’s organic.”

Jisung opened his eyes. Hyunjin was a cautious arm’s length away, hands twined behind his back. He wore a black toque that covered his ears today.

Deciding to be difficult, Jisung grabbed the Ottogi brand instead and tossed it into his basket. “Organic, yes, but more expensive.”

“I’m sure you can spare a bag of your choco pies for higher quality tea.”

“Are you following me?” Jisung asked. “If you are, then I appreciate your blatant admiration, but there are better ways to show it instead of stalking me. Meeting these many times in a big city is not a coincidence, and definitely not from luck.”

Hyunjin breezily ignored the accusation and said, “Changbin hyung likes the Nokchawon brand. Maybe you’ll like it too. Might make you sweeter on the inside.”

Jisung blinked at the familiar words. Hyunjin held up his bag of instant coffee as a complacent salute before he turned around and walked out of the aisle. He reunited with Jeongin, who’d been watching them at the end of the aisle with a bizarre look on his face. Jisung watched them disappear from the corner and looked at the Ottogi brand in his basket. Disgruntled, he swapped it with the Nokchawon brand.

At the apartment, Changbin took one look at the yuja tea among other groceries and his eyes bugged. “Why’d you buy this one?”

“Your favourite,” Jisung intoned.

“How’d you know?”

“Call it an annoying gut feeling.”

Changbin laughed, visibly pleased at the jar in his hands. “You could’ve gotten the cheaper one, dude, but hey, it’s nice of you. Thanks. Want some?”

Jisung shrugged, going to put away the rest of the groceries. “Okay.”

It was more sour than sweet, but he drank all of it anyway.

Autumn was slowly swept away by the upcoming winter season with bare trees poised like ballet dancers and icy paths that crunched like sugar underfoot. Jisung worked four days in a row for a full ten hours and smoked discreetly with his co-worker in the parking lot of the building, trying not to get caught by authorities. Though the upside was that he received an hour break instead of half an hour, the unfairly paid labour and weight of a life with no direction exhausted him to the core.

Changbin usually returned home during semester break to visit his older sister, but he was staying back this year since his sister was with their parents, and Changbin didn’t like to talk about his parents. Chan never went home during the break either, always eager to work on his own endeavors. Family was an untouched subject for him. Jisung learned to never pry.

Minho had no home to go back to during the holidays, too. Sometimes, they’d sit at the curb outside of the convenience store he worked at, smoking and pretending they weren’t afraid of being alone.

(“You could always invite me over,” Jisung offered.

Minho opened his mouth, a cloud of smoke billowing past the cigarette posed between his lips. His hair was a shock of colour in the pale carapace of the streets, a bright tangerine that clashed against the gun-metal grey of the earth. “You only say that when you’re trying to run.”

Jisung scoffed. “From what?”

“You tell me.” Minho glanced over at him. He smiled just a bit and reached over to touch his knee, but not quite touching him. “Let’s not overstep our boundaries, now, shall we?”)

With Changbin staying for break, it meant that he’d make sure Jisung didn’t turn into a full-blown troglodyte by dragging him outside to run errands and buy groceries and attend events, and it just so happened that the first week of December was when the musical premiered. Everyone was going, including Changbin, and if he was going, then he would somehow manage to drag Jisung with him too -- much to his dismay.

“Why?” Jisung asked, frowning at the ticket that had been thrown at him. “I don’t want to go.”

“You should support your friend, dingus. C’mon, get your lazy butt off of the couch already!” Changbin yanked at Jisung’s sleeve. “Let’s go!”

“But I don’t like musicals,” Jisung grouched. “They’re so boring. I’m bored enough as it is. Why bore me even more? Just let me watch this baking show and go on your merry way without me.”

“You’ve already watched this episode, man. Like, so many times. This has literally been on repeat forever.”

“So? He’s talking about gay bread. Bread that is _gay_.”

“That won’t cut it.” Changbin clicked his tongue and grabbed the remote. He closed the television and slid the remote underneath the couch in one, smooth motion, that had Jisung almost gaping. “Now, go get cleaned up and wear something nice. Or at least presentable.”

“If I throw a stick, will you leave?”

“Ha-ha, very funny,” Changbin deadpanned. Once Jisung saw that there was no way out of this, he sighed in defeat and got up from the couch. He cracked his back as he stretched his arms over his head and yawned.

Jisung objectively didn’t have anything nice, so he threw on what he usually wore: jeans, a hoodie, and a windbreaker. Changbin nodded at him in approval but tossed him a checkered scarf, mentioning that it’d be cold. Jisung winded it snugly over his neck and grabbed his essentials before following after Changbin out the door.

Most of the ride to campus was Changbin cursing his lungs out whenever Jisung took a sharp turn or clumsily pulled into the next lane. He wouldn’t shut up especially when Jisung parked in a way that took up two lots instead of one, but Jisung didn’t care enough to fix it. They paid for parking and met up with the others outside of the theatre hall. Felix gave him a hug and Chan squealed in his ear. Jeongin sent him a peace sign. Seungmin wasn't there.

Jisung’s never stepped foot into the university’s theatre before. It was a large and grand space with velvet galleries rimmed with gold stretched around the grand circle. Since they were associated with Hyunjin, they were given the orchestra seats that settled them in a perfect distance from the stage, along with a detailed pamphlet about the musical, the performers, and the department.

“Wake me up when it ends,” Jisung whispered as he sunk in his seat and closed his eyes.

Changbin elbowed him. “Don’t be fucking rude. If you fall asleep, I’m going to shove this pamphlet down your throat and my foot up your ass.”

“Please be quiet. I'm trying to manifest a truckload of money into my bank account so that I can retire and never have to clean a toilet ever again.”

“You’re intolerable. Lord help prevent me from committing homicide.”

“Oh. You mean _homie_ cide?”

Changbin groaned. “You are the reason why they put instructions on the back of shampoo bottles.”

Jisung never had the capacity to sit through long events he had no interest in. He zoned out through all the speeches made in the beginning. He was dozing off with his eyes open when the curtains had been drawn to reveal the stage and the lights dimmed. There was medieval music, there was singing, there was dramatics, there was dancing. There was a plot Jisung couldn’t follow. He kept shifting and bouncing his leg to the point that Changbin had to put his hand on his knee to keep him still.

But then, at some point, Jisung heard him: draped in white silk with blue on his sharp face -- the kind of blue that reminded Jisung of glacier meltwater, pale with an iridescence not easily forgotten. It was a chorus and it was clear he was the lead of it from the way his voice soared like an eagle on an up-draft and how he moved with purposeful clarity.

Hyunjin danced like streamers of paper rain. Jisung could tell how much heart he put into dancing, into singing, if the look of pure delight on his face and the warm glow in the glare of his eyes was anything to show for it. And at that moment, Jisung was seized by a mere, single thought:

Hyunjin seemed like the blue at the farthest reaches of places.

The audience suddenly felt stifling. Jisung could feel the bitter blue rising until it hit the back of his throat. He tried to listen as Hyunjin performed his role gracefully despite having given up on following the musical’s plot line since the start, but Jisung kept drifting away. Changbin let him play with his stubby, inked fingers, but Jisung couldn’t sit still any longer. He needed to leave. He needed to get out.

As the performers jumped into another number, Jisung shot up from his seat. He ignored Changbin’s hushed whispers as he made his way out of the row, tripping over long legs. He ran down the aisle and pushed through the large doors to a blueberry-tipped nightfall that gave him the reprieve he needed.

His hands were shaky as he lit up a cigarette. He inhaled harshly that sent him into a coughing fit. Jisung crouched down and willed for his stomach to stop churning, for his chest to stop quivering, because it wasn’t fear he felt. It wasn’t anger, or melancholy, or the unresolved grief rotting in between his ribs.

It was jealousy, because he’d forgotten how passion looked like.

But that was it. He couldn’t have felt it, because Jisung didn’t want anymore. He’d become dull, lackluster, aimless. Anything akin to a spark had been taken away, just like his dad. So Jisung couldn’t understand why -- why now, why this, why him.

He exhaled slowly and looked up at the sky as if the moonlight could warm him. Jisung wished he was home. He regretted giving into Changbin’s complaints in the first place, but funnily enough, it seemed as though he was recently regretting a lot of things relating to Hyunjin.

Jisung didn’t return to the hall. He crouched outside in the cold and smoked three cigarettes until he heard the resounding applause from inside. He stubbed out the current one in his fingers and stood up, feeling his thighs burn from staying in that position for so long that his legs felt numb. Jisung leaned his shoulder against the building wall and waited for a group of familiar faces to exit past the doors, but he didn’t have to wait long when the first head to pop out of the door was Felix.

Felix whipped his head around before his face brightened at the sight of Jisung. He jogged towards him in his thickly padded jacket with raised brows, pointing at him before flicking his hands into a thumbs up.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Jisung said, though his reassurance seemed to fall flat. “Just needed air.”

Felix frowned. He took out his phone and typed something out, before showing his screen of an opened notes app to Jisung: _For two hours? You were gone for basically the entire performance. You must be freezing!_

Jisung blinked. He hadn’t noticed two hours had passed. “Huh.”

Felix pouted and reached forward to tug at his scarf. Then, he typed something else out on his phone. _We’re going for KBBQ now. Hyunjin will meet us there after his meeting. Will you come with us too?_

“I’ll think about it.” Jisung mulled over his next words. “Does he drive?”

Felix tilted his head.

“Hyunjin,” he clarified.

Felix shrugged. Jisung nodded and took out his pack. “Take Changbin hyung, then. I’ll wait and drop Hyunjin off at the restaurant. Just text me the location.”

Felix perked up. He looked astonished for the most part, but also amused. He eagerly nodded and mimicked a steering wheel before flashing him a thumbs-up and a smile. Jisung managed a tiny laugh and flicked him on the forehead.

_I’ll tell them you’re okay, then?_

“Yeah. I appreciate it.”

Felix nodded. He waved goodbye before he ran past the crowds piling out of the doors and diffusing among the grounds. He lifted his gaze up to the sky. It was so clear now; it looked like one of those cracked open geodes with everything sharp and glittering inside.

Jisung didn’t know how long he waited. When it had gotten too cold for him to stay outside, he slipped back into the theatre hall for some warmth and took a seat by the doors. Jisung recognized Hyunjin almost immediately among the other performers that were gathered near the stage, interacting with staff and members of the audience that had stayed behind.

He watched them with disinterest as they took photos. Hands of a stranger snaked around Hyunjin’s waist and lowered to his hips with a firm grasp. It was like that with the others, too -- lingering touches, discreet hands, adoration that turned to intent when Hyunjin looked away. And all through that, not once did Hyunjin’s smile falter.

There was an itch he couldn’t reach underneath his skin. Jisung stood up from his seat, preferring to freeze to death than to watch them, when Hyunjin looked up.

His face split in surprise -- comical, almost -- when he spotted Jisung. Hyunjin excused himself and peeled away from the group. Up close, Jisung could tell his back was drawn tight like a bow string. Though the smile on his face belied no such possibility, Hyunjin was a lot more expressive than he seemed to give himself credit for.

“I’m surprised you came,” Hyunjin said, sweaty and smeared of blue and gold. There were skeins of blue tassels braided in his hair. “Changbin hyung dragged you here, didn’t he?”

“Against my will, yes.”

“Where are the others? Why is it just you here?”

Jisung took out his keys and shook them gently. “I’m your personal chauffeur. They already went ahead to eat. How long are you gonna take?”

“Not long. We just have to wrap up and clean,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back with an oily smile. “So. What did you think?”

Jisung had the memory of a knife. He remembered exactly how Hyunjin moved across the stage like an opening flower, or a bird aloft, or the rising sun spreading like wildfire into the sky that lit the clouds with a white-gold haze. His legs extended like a ballet dancer, gliding from place to place, strong arms held in front, fingertips touching.

“Boring,” he answered, making a show of yawning. “Put me to sleep like a fucking baby.”

Offended, Hyunjin opened his mouth and was about to say something when he was interrupted by his name being called. Hyunjin looked over his shoulder and motioned at his castmates for a few more minutes. Jisung watched them interact with the other audience members so freely and blissfully unaware that it grated on his nerves.

“Hey,” he said. “Why do you let them do that?”

Hyunjin frowned. “Do what?”

“Touch you like that.”

Hyunjin blinked in surprise. He looked confused at first, but then understanding settled in his eyes. He was wringing his wrists again, licking at the peeling skin of his lips that showed through the faded colour of red. “It’s not really like that. It’s all part of the show.”

“But the show’s over. You don’t owe them anything.”

“I know I don’t.”

“Then why let them do it?”

Hyunjin flared his nostrils. “I don’t _let_ them do anything.”

“Right, because you want it,” he intoned.

Hyunjin took in a deep breath and blew it out slowly. He kept his voice low, though it shook from how much he was trying to compose himself. “Why do you do this every time we talk? Like, make everything turn into an argument or a debate or whatever. Doesn’t it get tiring to be such a tiring person? Always trying to prove you’re right?”

Jisung shrugged indifferently. “ _I_ wasn’t the one who suggested we be friends. I warned you.”

Hyunjin laughed without humour. “Yeah. You did. If only I listened, right?”

At the beckoning of his castmates, Hyunjin sent Jisung an austere frown and returned to the group. Jisung watched him go take his photos before he left the hall and went to sit down on one of the benches outside to calm himself down.

As a means to distract himself, he thought about his home: the sunflower curtains that swayed to a slight breeze that escaped through the open windows, the peeling blue wallpaper and cracked walls that spread all around despite the plaster he’d slabbed on to cover them up, and the smell of burning incense to mask the mold that was creeping into his house. There were muddy footprints on the floorboards that Jisung could never seem to scrub away.

He could hear Changbin nudging him to be more gentle, but Jisung’s hands weren’t made to handle fragile things. They were scarred and calloused and clumsy. They were lonely and angry and longing. They were still stuck in the blue lozenges of the past.

Jisung sucked in a deep breath, held it in for four, before he exhaled slowly in the same, measured pace. He repeated the technique until his mind was less fuzzy and his chest didn’t feel like an anchor pulling him down to the lava-pumping pistons of the earth. He didn’t know how long he sat there on the bench, letting the cold nip at his numb cheeks as he gazed up at the sky, until footsteps crunching against frozen grass jolted him out of his reverie.

“You could have waited at your car,” Hyunjin said, all bundled up in his coat and thick scarf with all the makeup cleaned off of his face. The glimmering tassels were still in his hair. “I know what your car looks like. Changbin hyung told me it was the shitty camry with duct taped headlights.”

Jisung blinked. He didn’t like it when time escaped his fingers. “Oh.”

“Are you okay?”

“Don’t ask me that,” he said and stood up. “Let’s go already instead of wasting more of my time.”

He turned around and began walking towards the parking lot, ignoring Hyunjin’s scoff of disbelief. Jisung could hear muttered insults thrown at his back, but he dismissed them like they were mere comments about the weather.

It was a quiet drive home.

Hyunjin was humming along to the pop song playing from the radio. Jisung didn’t like the song but he let it play to its end before switching to a less mainstream channel. He heard the same rock song that had played in the morning and sighed. He pressed down on the accelerator and abruptly jerked into the next lane.

“Dude, what the fuck,” Hyunjin cursed, gripping onto his seatbelt. “There’s no one behind you. Can’t you slow down?”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why should I slow down.”

Exasperated, Hyunjin exclaimed, “It’s illegal!”

Jisung shrugged and merged into a lane that’d take them back to the city. “Half the shit I’ve done in life has been illegal. Speeding on a highway is way at the bottom of the list.”

“Oh my God.”

Back into the city, the restaurant was a ten minute drive. Jisung recognized the neon glow of the restaurant’s sign shining above the door’s lintel and pulled into an empty spot on the curbside, accidentally hitting the edge with his tire, and stopped a sliver away from bumping into the back of the car in front of them. He slanted a glance to Hyunjin, who had a white-knuckled grasp around the door handle.

“I accept payment via coffee.” Jisung unlocked the doors. “Now go away.”

Hyunjin blinked out of his fear-induced reverie and snapped his head to him. “You’re not coming?”

“Not in the mood.”

“How come?” Hyunjin persisted. “Because you ruined it?”

“By driving spectacularly? No.” Jisung tapped a finger against the steering wheel. “By pointing out the obvious but receiving vague answers? Also no, because that’s on you. I have better things to do than to babysit a bunch of adult drunkards, such as laying on the couch rewatching the same episode of a baking show and drinking a bunch of tea until I fall into a caffeine comatose.”

Hyunjin took off his seatbelt but only did so to turn around in his seat and face Jisung. “Why are you so hung up on that? They’re just pictures. It’s not like they’re -- _propositioning_ me or anything like that.”

“But do they ask you?”

“Ask me?”

Jisung turned off the headlights of the car. “Do they ask you for permission to touch you like that.”

“No,” Hyunjin said slowly. He was looking at Jisung as if he was trying to understand something written right in front of his face. “But it’s okay -- “

“It’s _not_ ,” Jisung snapped. “Not when you don’t want it.”

Hyunjin fell silent and Jisung looked away. He stared down at the gear shift before his eyes travelled to the radio station, where he aggressively punched the buttons until it was back on the mainstream pop channel. It was playing a Christmas song that annoyed him more rather than precipitate festive cheer, so he lowered the volume until it was barely audible.

Jisung liked the silence, but not the silence that came after he spoke. He didn’t like the idea of being misunderstood or found unintelligible, because no one would ever understand him. No one would want to hear what he had to say. The frustrating ordeal of being misinterpreted made him wish he kept his mouth shut and just kicked Hyunjin out of his car instead of firing back. Maybe he did have a complex with always wanting to prove himself right.

But then Hyunjin was playing with the daisy charm of his necklace, looking out of the window. “You won’t understand.”

“Try me.”

“Fine.” Hyunjin let out a single, dry laugh. He shifted in his seat to look at Jisung with half of his face encompassed by the shadows. “Do you know why I dance? Not because I love it, but because _I_ need to be loved too.

“When I’m up on stage, _that’s_ what everyone sees. _That’s_ who everyone loves. And _that’s_ who they expect when they approach me off-stage. If they knew the real me, then they probably wouldn’t even like me, so this is the only way I can receive love -- by performing, by playing a role, by doing all of _that_ even if I hate it. And if I want to get anywhere with this kind of career, that’s the kind of interaction I’ll have to put up with for the rest of my life.”

“And it’s worth it?” Jisung challenged. “You’ll let people hurt you just for superficial love? Are you even genuine about your art or are you just consumed by the gratification it brings?”

Hyunjin was flushed in the face with growing anger. “Don’t say shit like you know me.”

“Yeah, I don’t, ‘cause according to your own words, _this_ isn’t the _real_ you.”

Hyunjin flinched like he’d been stung by a flame, but that hurt was fleeting when his expression immediately morphed into something stone cold. He leaned forward with eyes ablaze and gave Jisung a nasty snarl: “I heard a lot about you from the guys, you know. For someone who quit music, quit life, and cleans up shit for a living, you sure do have a lot to say about my art. I don’t need to hear it from someone who has no fucking direction in their life right now.”

Hot pressure churned in the base of Jisung’s stomach, threatening to pour out of his throat or leak through his shaking fingertips. But Jisung swallowed everything down like a fire-seed that fed the constant flames in his belly. He willed himself to calm down, to fall back into the motions of apathy because that was who he was now, and he tucked his hands beneath his thighs.

“You’re right,” he said flatly, though it didn’t come out sounding right. “You should go now. They’re waiting for you.”

Hyunjin blinked at him, startled by the change in demeanor. He had looked ready to argue, to fight fire with fire and punctuate each word with malice, only to receive Jisung’s lukewarm attempt to disassemble the conversation. He opened his mouth, thought twice about it, then closed it. Hyunjin didn’t say anything as he grabbed his things and stepped out of the car. He slammed it, though, as emphasis.

Jisung watched him disappear into the restaurant and peeled away from the curb before Changbin could come out and try to drag him inside.

He sped back home. He hurried back into his apartment. He flicked on the lights and stood there in the middle of the living room, staring at the walls with trembling hands and hot lava rumbling in his stomach with something dangerous -- something unfulfilled, like he wanted to shout everything out, collapse inward, and to never be seen again.

Jisung shut his eyes. He was afraid that if he were to move a single muscle, he’d lose control in a blink of an eye and hurt something. Maybe himself. He needed to keep his hands busy. He needed to keep himself busy, because he hated feeling angry and hated the fact that he was angry in the first place.

Without much thought, he stomped into his room and threw his closet open. He dug through the pile of unfolded clothes and bags of trinkets he’d hidden away, when he fished out a case and put it on the floor by his bedside. Jisung unzipped the bag and took out his father's dreadnought with shaky hands that could never seem to stop shaking.

He laid down on the floor with the guitar and let what was left of muscle memory take over. The strings were out of tune and grimy, and it sounded horrible whenever he plucked a string or strummed a chord, but he didn’t care as he positioned his hands and felt his calloused fingers ache with familiarity.

Jisung played badly, but it stopped him from destroying things, so he kept going.

He didn’t know how long he played. He was getting lost in the blue of the streetlights that illuminated his room. It reminded him of his dad, who had introduced Jisung to the guitar in the first place, and had taught him his very first song that ignited something within his growing heart.

_“I wanna be a musician now,” his younger self enthused. “It’s so fun and cool and it makes me wanna make music like you used to do for a long, long time!”_

_His step-dad grinned at him and ruffled his hair. “You may have just found your passion, then.”_

_“Passion?”_

_“It’s like -- something you love so, so very much that you can’t live without doing. For me, it’s travelling and capturing all the species out there in the world. And now, maybe for you, it’s music.” His dad set aside the guitar and took Jisung by the shoulders. “A passion is a special, personal thing. Always remember to keep it close to your heart, okay? Keep it burning.”_

_Jisung had eagerly nodded. “Okay! I can do that. I can do anything!”_

_“Of course you can! You’re my son, after all. Alright, why don’t we sign you up to some music classes tomorrow, then?”_

And then Hyunjin’s voice pierced through his memory, making it dissolve into a warbled mixture of water and oil. “ _Because I need to be loved_ ,” Hyunjin had said, as if it was the easiest thing in the world to say -- an admission of vulnerability Jisung never could have foreseen from somebody so seemingly put together. “ _Because I need to be loved_ ,” he had said, moving gracefully across the stage, his mind commanding the body into a powerful contortion of muscles. “ _Because I need to be loved_ ,” he had said, because that was what creation was all about, wasn’t it? Besides loving your craft, you love the love given to you for it too.

Jisung had once felt like that -- once hungered for it. Maybe he still did.

His fingers paused above the grimy strings. Jisung stared up at the cracks on the ceilings. All that anger had turned into a blue and sticky blob inside his chest. **SO ALONE I WISH I WAS DEAD** , his teenage self had once written all over the blue door of his high school’s bathroom stall, but now that he thought about it -- it wasn’t true at all. He wished he was alive instead because loneliness wasn’t something for the living. It was for the dying. It was for the dead. It _was_ death. He had held himself in his hands and wanted nothing more than to destroy it.

So how could he ask to be loved when all he did was beg to be left alone?

Jisung dug the heels of his palms into his eyes. He laid there, with the dusty warmth of his guitar on his stomach, and let his mind surf through the moonlight. He tried to think of happier memories -- ones that didn’t include his dad.

There was the memory of Changbin dragging him to campus so they could play with puppies together during finals. There was Chan, laughing effervescently in his ear when Jisung had said something stupid and silly. There was Minho, holding his hand when the sky seemed a bit too heavy on blue, sunny days, despite no longer being obligated to hold him in the first place. And now, there was the memory of Felix, who smiled every time he showed up to hand him sweet things that were resulted from stress-induced baking. 

They were there, even when Jisung felt like he didn’t deserve any of the love they reserved for him.

He was slowly drifting off as the anger slowly seeped away back into its dormancy. The last thing Jisung remembered before falling asleep was the blue at the deepest depths of the ocean, unreachable like the sparkling tassels braided through midnight hair.

Jisung was smoking on the balcony when he heard the doors slide open behind him. Changbin stepped forward and leaned his arms against the railing, scrunching his nose at the acrid smell of cigarette smoke. He was bundled up in his robe with a blanket thrown over his shoulders, opposite to Jisung, who was just wearing his flimsy windbreaker underneath a grey sky that looked like it was about to rain.

“Hey,” Changbin greeted gruffly.

“Hi.”

Changbin was watching cars rush by the slushy roads. There was an old woman walking her Yorkshire terrier over the frost-crusted sidewalks, and a mother and daughter waiting by the crosswalk as the lights turned red. Jisung took a shallow drag and exhaled slowly, watching the smoke be whisked away by a cold breeze.

“So,” Changbin drawled. “Something happened last night, right? Actually, don’t answer that, because you’re gonna lie and I’m gonna see through it because you’re a shit liar.”

“I’m not a shit liar,” Jisung grumbled.

“Fine. Would I look good with a mullet?”

Jisung looked him dead in the eye. “Absolutely.”

“Oh, fuck off. _See_? Shit liar!” Changbin exclaimed, holding up a fist with the threatening aura of a puppy, and Jisung finally cackled. “For the record, I would totally look good with a mullet. Don’t you remember the time in eleventh grade where I grew out my hair? I looked like David Bowie’s long lost Korean brother. Anyway, that’s not the point. What were we talking about again? Right, yeah. You two idiots. Hyunjin was in a bad mood the entire night yesterday. Wouldn’t grill the fucking meat even when I told him to a gazillion times.”

“Sounds like a ‘you’ problem to me.”

“Don’t go all wiseass on me,” Changbin scoffed. “I had to listen to him complain about you the whole ride home. Felix had to shut him up by threatening to drive off a ditch. Do you know how scary the guy is when he’s whipping his hands around? They’re like scissors. Snip-snap!”

“Do you usually talk this much in the morning? You’re so _loud_ ,” Jisung groaned, picking at his ear.

“I don’t care. I’ll be loud whenever I want to. Mind telling me what you two argued about now?”

“There’s not much to tell.” Jisung watched the cigarette burn between his fingers. “You know me, hyung. I’m hard to get along with.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because I’m not a nice guy.”

“You know that’s not true.”

Jisung shrugged, too tired to argue. “I don’t know, then.”

Changbin was studying him quietly before he let out a tiny sigh. He wrapped the blanket tighter around his shoulders, making him seem smaller and softer than usual. Changbin always looked warm and comfortable within his own body. Jisung wanted to know what that felt like.

“I think you guys have a lot more in common,” he said.

“Like what? An insufferable amount of pride?”

Changbin laughed dryly. “Oh, that too. I was thinking more like how you two have a hard time talking.” At Jisung’s questioning frown, he continued on in a softer voice. “Jeongin’s told me how Hyunjin usually has a hard time opening up to people. Kind of like a tomcat, y’know? Always watching and waiting but then running away when someone tries to reach for him. You’re the same -- maybe a whole lot worse.”

Jisung stubbed out his cigarette against the ashtray. He wanted to refute those words, yet he couldn’t find it within himself to do so, because there was some truth to it. Jisung was distant and unavailable to a fault, but not out of strategy, but out of fear. It had always been easier to pretend that he didn’t feel anything than to express his emotions and find himself obliged to explain them.

Jisung bit the inside of his cheek. “He seems to open up just fine to me.”

“Because you’re an ass when you want to be,” Changbin snorted. “You -- I don’t know. You know the right places to poke and prod, and that’s what gets a conversation going. You have a real knack at instigating, you know that?”

Jisung wanted the conversation to end already. He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “I just don’t understand him.”

“You could try.”

“I might lose all my brain cells.”

“When did you have any in the first place?”

Jisung shot him a glare and punched him lightly in the shoulder. Changbin laughed. “He’s a good guy, Jisung. I’m not asking you to be like best friends, but maybe try and get along with him. It’d be nice if we could all hang out together without wanting to genuinely strangle each other by the end of the night.”

Changbin was looking at him so warmly as though he knew Jisung wouldn’t disappoint him, but that didn’t make sense, because Jisung’s disappointed Changbin so many times already. Jisung couldn’t understand how Changbin could still look at him like that -- like someone still so deserving of warmth and love. It unnerved him down to the core.

He thought of the guitar stuffed back into the depths of his closet -- that bubbling anger buried back down into the grave Jisung made for it, and the sheen of blue that grazed his windows when he had woken up. The world was grey today but it always felt the bluest when the sun was hidden away.

Jisung swallowed and looked down at his shaky hands gripped around the cold railings. “I’ll try. No guarantees, though. I mean, maybe he’s just jealous of my face.”

“With the one he has right now? I _highly_ doubt it.”

A twinge of annoyance rippled through his body. “Shut up. What do you want me to do about him?”

“Well, since you’re so dead set on not sharing your contact information, you can come to Yeonjun’s party next week since everyone’s going, including Hyunjin,” Changbin beamed. “It’s, like, a pre-holiday party. Also ‘cause Yeonjun’s place is in the buttfuck of nowhere and I don’t trust anyone but you to drive me there and back in one piece.”

“Again?” Jisung groaned. “Seriously? Don’t you people have anything better to do?”

Changbin smacked him on the back of his head. “As if you weren’t a university student two years ago. Get in the holiday spirit, man! Free booze and food and all that shit. You can, like, steal one of his fancy spoons if you want. He’s kinda loaded. Anyway. Do you have work today?” When Jisung shook his head, Changbin grinned. “Alright. I’ll make us some coffee then.”

Jisung watched him slip back inside. His gaze flickered to the flimsy film of ice layered over the untrodden sidewalks. The houses across his apartment were decked out in gaudy Christmas lights and sparkling garlands, and one of them even had a large inflatable Snowman situated on their front yard alongside glowing reindeers.

He let the first raindrop trickle down his nose before he pottered back into the apartment.

───

Jisung felt like a fly trapped in a mason jar.

Though Jisung didn’t like parties, he also didn’t like the the thought of Changbin getting into a car with drunk strangers, so even if it disrupted his pre-planned day of sleeping until sunset and watching bad horror movies until dawn, he drove Changbin to Yeonjun’s party with a renewed arsenal of plastic bags and air freshening vent clips in the glovebox.

Guests occupied every surface area of the mansion. Jisung could barely make out the shape of the crowd through the neon lights flashing like police sirens in his eyes. He had to shove past hands offering him cups of spiked punch that had him on edge, and he ended up nestling in the kitchen corner watching the cutlery on the tabletops rattle from the music.

He felt see-through among the endless sea of blinking eyes. There was the pungent smell of alcohol filling his nose and the feathery touches of passing strangers whose eyes lingered on his barely conceivable face in the pulsing dark. It was all too familiar territory that made him want to crawl out of his own skin and be swallowed by the world in nothing but gristle and bones.

Jisung wanted to leave. There were too many people. He wanted to be alone. He wanted to accumulate secrets within his own solitude like the dirt beneath his nails.

Itching for a cigarette, Jisung pushed his way out of the kitchen. He stayed near the walls as he tried to navigate through the crowd, but he couldn’t decide whether or not the front or back would be the quietest option for him to smoke in peace. Jisung figured he could find some reprieve upstairs in an empty room, and was about to climb his way up the stairs when he stopped.

In the alcove beneath the spiral staircase, Hyunjin was there, politely declining a red corrugated cup being persisted at him by one of his dappy, drunk friends with rainbow highlights who leaned in too close. Jisung couldn’t see Hyunjin all too clearly in the shadows, but he recognized the language in his body -- the hunch in the shoulders; the hollow laugh; the condition written all over his too-expressive face. That was the look of a man attempting to hide in the crowd by behaving as though he had too many friends.

Jisung recognized it all too well. He’d been there before.

He could see the underlying discomfort in Hyunjin’s faltering smile as his hands fluttered between pushing the cup away and trying to pry his friend’s fingers off of his waist. At one point, when it looked like Hyunjin was actually contemplating taking the cup as if it was the only solution, that was when Jisung started moving.

“Hey!” Jisung yelled over the noise as he inserted himself into the circle and snatched the cup out of the guy’s hands. He didn’t know what he was doing. What was doing? “Is that for me? God, I was feeling thirsty. Thanks, dude.”

“Jisung?” Hyunjin’s voice sounded distant in his ears. “What are you -- “

Jisung ignored him as he tipped the cup back; it was fruity, masking the pungent taste of alcohol and an oddly strong hint of anise, and it burned on the way down as it settled into the pit of his stomach. He could hear Hyunjin’s friends cheering and egging him on to finish the whole thing, so he guzzled it all down to the last drop. He licked the rim of the cup before tossing it at their feet.

“That was shit,” Jisung said, wiping his chin with the back of his trembling hand. “And a dirty trick. What’d you lace the punch with? Absinthe?”

The friend with the rainbow hair laughed, unfazed at the rudeness and clearly a little more than tipsy. “Hey, c’mon now. It’s the perfect time to get fucked up in here!” He turned his attention to Hyunjin, pointing at him with an inked finger. “Why don’t I get ya another one? You need to loosen up and stop being such a prude, y’know -- always actin’ so prim and proper, even with us.”

Hyunjin looked stiff with something akin to anger -- the type of anger to simmer underneath skin and rot inside without an outlet. His mouth was moving, but Jisung was finding it hard to focus when there were so many voices blending in with each other.

There was white static. There was a fire in his stomach. He squeezed his eyes shut when the room seemed to spin. He couldn’t tell if it was the alcohol or the panic or the fear, but he tasted copper and ghosts on his tongue that had the bitter blue running up his throat. A sound escaped his throat uninvited, something he barely recognized -- then the next thing he knew, Hyunjin had him by the sleeve and was dragging him through the crowd.

There were hands and hands and arms and arms, the rush of static in his ears as his eyes fluttered against the dizzy spinning lights. There was the image of Hyunjin’s back weaving through the crowd. Something black, etched into the skin of his nape, peaked from underneath the collar of his jacket. As soon as they stepped outside, the heat of sticky bodies vanished and Jisung sharply gasped for fresh air.

Then he pushed Hyunjin aside and stumbled onto his knees to vomit.

The first time he drank was by accident.

He’d opened up a beer instead of a sprite when he’d mistaken the two cans as a child, and his dad had gotten angry at him -- not because Jisung had drank it, but because he had wasted it. Jisung didn’t know why beer made his dad so happy when it tasted like dirt and mothballs. Sometimes, he wondered which his dad missed the most: his son or the bottle.

Jisung knew, at the back of his head, that it would always be the latter.

The second time he drank, he was sixteen, trying to gain liquid courage to hook up with a random pretty girl he ended up losing his virginity to. She wore blue-beaded bracelets and a cross necklace. It was the same cross he paid respects to when he attended her funeral two weeks after.

Then came the third time where he got drunk in the basement of an upperclassman who let him smoke out of a pen with his hand down Jisung’s pants. Then the fourth, fifth, sixth -- neverending.

He drank as much as he could through his tentative years of university, trying to chase the same numbness and high that withered his dad into a piece of threadbare cloth. Jisung wanted to know how it felt, to know why this was worth more to him than his own son, to know where and why everything went wrong.

But the last time he drank, he was nineteen. Jisung got fucked up so bad that he blacked out and woke up unable to feel his body -- only the freshly bruised skin where unfamiliar hands had pressed into him.

Then he stopped. He stopped a lot of things, after that.

At some point, the static in his ears slowly fizzled out and back into the loud, thunderous music. It felt like all of his insides had been replaced with cotton. There was a hand on his elbow and warbled chatter he couldn’t make sense of. A shadow hovered above him. All he could distinguish was Hyunjin’s trembling voice as he snapped at the hand around his elbow: “ _Hey. Don’t touch him._ ”

Then, the hand was gone. Then, Hyunjin’s voice was in his ear, whispering, “Jisung? Can you -- can you stand? It’s just me. I’m gonna take you somewhere that’s more quiet. Is that okay?”

Jisung wiped his mouth with a sleeve and nodded.

Hyunjin hooked Jisung’s arm around his shoulder and hoisted Jisung up by the waist, taking his half-staggering body with him up the steps. He belatedly realized he’d screwed his eyes shut, and just as Hyunjin settled him down on something that was cool to the touch, he opened his eyes and found himself looking up at the night sky filled with stars, like a galaxy on a planetarium ceiling.

“Jisung?” Hyunjin appeared over him, blocking his view of the sky. “Are you conscious? Do you understand what I’m saying right now?”

Jisung grunted. Instead of answering, he looked around his surroundings. Hyunjin had deposited him into an empty jacuzzi surrounded by lattice walls and a redwood pergola on Yeonjun’s multi-level patio, tucked into the corner of the deck. There were less people around them as the crowd seemed to navigate towards an event happening in the house when loud cheers could be heard.

He looked down at the sound of crumpled plastic and found a water bottle being held out for him. Jisung took a desperate swig of it and winced at the stench of bile in his mouth.

“Do you -- should I call the ambulance, or something?” Hyunjin asked, destroying his bottom lip with his teeth.

“Why?” Jisung sounded like he’d been gargling rusty nails. “It’s not like I’m dead.”

That seemed to be the cue for Hyunjin to lose that shaking composure of his. The concern in his expression immediately bleeded out into red-faced fury, and his shoulders trembled in barely contained anger as his hands curled into fists. “You’re a fucking _idiot_. Why did you take that if you couldn't handle it? You don’t even drink! What the hell were you thinking?”

Jisung stretched his legs out as much as he could in the jacuzzi, narrowly missing Hyunjin’s hip when the latter sat across from him. “You’re one to talk. Do they know you’ve been sober for a while now or is that something you don’t want people to know ‘cause it’s part of the _real_ you?”

“Oh, shut up. _Enough_ of that already. I didn’t need to be saved,” Hyunjin hissed. “I know just well what I’m getting into when I go to these kinds of things, and I know damn well how to take care of myself.”

“Right, ‘cause it totally looked like you were handling it. Has anyone ever told you that your lack of self-preservation is astounding?”

“You clearly have no idea what drowning looks like if you thought I wanted to be rescued from something as trivial as that.”

Jisung let out a raspy, dry laugh. “Sorry to break it to you, but _everything_ I do is from underwater.”

Hyunjin clenched his jaw and turned away, glaring at the dewy grass of the lawn. His hair wasn’t tied up, tonight. Blue glitter was pressed into the black of his eyelids, feathered out into wings, and he wore a low-collared layered mesh shirt underneath a leather jacket that revealed the jut of his collarbones. His earrings were silver again -- a slight blue rinse to them from the wispy moonlight.

“I don’t get you at all,” Hyunjin spoke in a low voice, eyes trained on his hands that were trying to uncurl. _I never know what to do with my hands._ “You’ve made it clear you don’t like me -- don’t get me wrong, the feeling’s mutual -- but you go and pull shit like that. What’s your deal?”

Jisung inhaled deeply and massaged his temples. He didn’t dislike Hyunjin to an extent, but he didn’t agree with him most of the time either. Hyunjin was -- dangerous, to say the least. Something disruptive.

Maybe he _was_ an idiot. Jisung didn’t know why he stepped in to help when it was clearly none of his business, and he wouldn’t be getting an answer for it either considering he was too busy in the process of dying to string together a reasoning. Agitated, he rested his head back and stared up at the stars, feeling his head pound against his skull like a ricocheting pinball.

He remembered his conversation with Changbin and tried to filter all the irritation he felt into something less negative. Jisung sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Dude. Just -- I don’t know. Consider it a peace offering, or something.”

“Peace offering?” Hyunjin asked slowly. “You mean for last time?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

“Right. _Oh_.”

“Like a truce?”

“Sure. Why not.”

“Is this your way of apologizing?” Hyunjin asked incredulously. “Because it’s a really roundabout way of apologizing without actually saying an apology.”

“Actions speak louder than words, man.”

“You’re confusing in both aspects, but I’ll take it.”

There was the sound of rustling. Hyunjin shifted in his seat, trying to mirror the way Jisung was pressing his cheek against the edge of the tub. They locked eyes for a moment before Hyunjin averted his gaze to the side. “Well, um. In retrospect, everything I said was embarrassing as shit, and I shouldn’t have brought up your life as a way to get back at you. I should’ve known better.”

“It’s chill. I don’t really care.” Jisung felt his whole body sag in exhaustion. His alcohol tolerance had always been lower than average much to his dismay, and Jisung wanted nothing more than to sleep away the buzz stitched into his skin. “And it wasn’t embarrassing. It was honest."

He took measured sips of water as he looked up at the sky. Then, he suddenly remembered why he wanted to head up the stairs in the first place before he got himself involved in Hyunjin’s business, and rummaged through the pockets of his windbreaker. He took out his pack of cigarettes and tucked one into his mouth. He leaned forward and wordlessly offered the pack to Hyunjin, who plucked a stick out of the box with lithe fingers.

Jisung passed the lighter to him after he’d lit up his own cigarette, and leaned back to take a long, deep drag, holding the smoke in his lungs for a satisfying moment before he exhaled. It settled his cravings and helped with the vestiges of bile and fruity absinthe he could still taste in his mouth.

“Does it give you bad memories?” Hyunjin asked quietly, his head tilted back as he blew a cloud of smoke. Jisung watched his Adam’s apple bob when he swallowed. “Drinking, I mean. It looked like it did.”

Jisung shrugged, trying to maintain his indifference, but his trembling fingers belied his facade. “Guess you could say that.”

Hyunjin nodded along to his response. “Me too.” He held the cigarette at the base between his index and middle finger as he brought it to his mouth. His eyes were thoughtfully trained on the ceiling of the pergola. “I wasn’t going to drink it, by the way.”

“What were you gonna do, then?”

“Dump it on his head.”

That surprised a weak laugh out of him. “Guess I should have left you alone. I would’ve liked to see that.”

Hyunjin huffed -- a telltale sign of a smothered laugh. But his eyes were crinkled, glimmering in the dismantled moonlight that shone through the slits of the pergola. His face was slightly covered by a thin haze of smoke when he opened his mouth. “But thanks for playing hero, even though I didn’t need one.”

Jisung shook his head with a half-hearted eye roll but didn’t say anything else. He tilted the cigarette in his fingers upwards and closed his eyes, hoping that it’d shut out the rest of the world so he could feel less like shit.

In the ever-present backdrop of noises, Jisung could hear Hyunjin’s voice close to him -- quiet and wispy, something shy of silvery, as he hummed to a song he didn’t recognize out loud. And slowly, Jisung found himself lulled to sleep by it as he delved into the depths of his dreams.

But most of the time, his dreams were memories. Sometimes warped or blurry, like he was watching it all from underneath the water where light cut through the teal surface like stained glass, and time had changed meager details anyone could have dismissed -- but not Jisung. Jisung remembered everything down to the tiniest wrinkle.

He was a kid again. Maybe six, or seven. His dad was tripping over his throaty laughter like a ditzy June bug, a ruddy glow to his sunken cheeks. He reeked of motor oil and musty sweat and hand sanitizer. Jisung wondered if his dad would smell more familiar if he drank the yellow dish soap from their kitchen sink instead.

“ _Remember this, Jisung-ah_ ,” his dad had said in a gravelly voice as he took Jisung’s tiny hand and led him down the sidewalk, their neighbours watching him with something akin to pity when they saw the bottle tucked beneath his dad’s arm. ” _Clean your shoes often if you can, so when you look down, your shoes will reflect the sky and remind you to look up. See?_ ”

His dad stopped and tapped the toes of his oxfords together, the polished sheen of it reflecting the summer sky. Jisung marvelled at them for a moment, before he asked, “ _Even my shoes?_ ”

“ _Of course! A little bit of the sky is everywhere even if you can’t see it, don’t you think?_ ”

Jisung beamed and bent down to wipe at the grime on his Converse sneakers with his ratty sleeve. Then he stood up and eagerly looked up at his dad, who laughed heartily out of amusement. It was the clearest sound he’d heard from his dad since a long, long time. It was a sound he missed and hated at the same time.

A fissure rippled through his dream. Jostled out of his sleep, Jisung blinked open his eyes and found Hyunjin closer to him than before.

“Hey,” Hyunjin whispered, tugging at his sleeve. “Changbin-hyung is coming to find us, now. I know how to drive. Well, kind of. Here, give me your keys.”

His eyelids felt like lead. He closed them and fished for his keys before holding them out for Hyunjin to take, and belatedly realized that the cigarette he had in his fingers was already long gone.

Jisung didn’t want to move from his spot. He wanted to go back to his dreams, his pale memories, in their verdant neighbourhood underneath the summer skylight before his heart had grown soft, dark spots on it, like a fruit that had gone bad, left to split open with nothing but wet rot.

There were footsteps and whispers and drunken murmurs. Then a tap on his shoulder had his eyes fluttering open again. Changbin stood over him with a mildly concerned look on his flushed face.

“You okay, ‘Sungie?” he slurred.

The strong alcohol had settled in his system now, making him a little loose-mouthed. Before he could formulate a single thought, his lips were already moving, “I never understood why he chose this over me. Tastes like dog shit.”

“Man, I’ve forgotten that you’re a total lightweight. How long has it been since you stopped drinking? Three years? I could never.” Changbin sighed, slipping his hands underneath Jisung’s arms to pull him up from the jacuzzi. Then, he brought Jisung into a hug, patting him on the back like he was a child that needed to be soothed from a ghost in his passenger seat. “There, there. You’ll be okay. You did something nice for Hyunjinie. I’m very proud of you.”

Jisung might cry. “Oh.”

There was a hand pressed gently at the back of his head that was a bit too big to be Changbin’s. “Yeah, it was nice.” Hyunjin said softly, then raised his voice to direct it to the older. “Will Felix and the others be okay?”

“Yuh-huh. He’s gonna drive Chan-hyung and Jeongin home -- mm, well, if he has space, ‘cause he stole Yeonjun’s silk sheets. And his pillow. Also his spoons. Oh, and a bottle of Romanee Conti 1945 from his parents’ stash of expensive wines that has the monetary value of my student debt.”

“We’ve raised a kleptomaniac,” Hyunjin gasped, before he perked up with a gleam of mischief in his eyes. “Well, as long as he steals from the rich, it shouldn’t matter! Hyung, mind telling him to steal me a set of fancy spoons too?”

“On it.”

“Now, where’d you guys park your car?”

“Over there,” Jisung groaned, pointing at a tree.

It might have been a comical sight to see Hyunjin drag two drunk and somewhat short men (compared to him, at least) on each side. Changbin was the worst since he was staggering all over the place and couldn’t even walk in a straight line. Jisung was mostly just sleepy. After Hyunjin finally found Jisung’s beat-up camry parked haphazardly in the driveway, he dumped the two of them in the backseat and settled in the driver’s seat, turning on the engine and giving himself an anxious, babbling prep talk.

“Do you even know how to drive a Camry?” Jisung asked.

Changbin snorted, putting his seatbelt on wrong. Jisung reached over and fixed it for him. “I don’t think he even knows how to drive at all. The only driving he does is driving away my sanity.”

“Hey!” Hyunjin sent a sharp glare at him over his shoulder. “Driving sucks, okay, because you can get _killed_. Thanks a lot by the way, Henry Ford, you fucking asshole.”

Changbin made a confused noise. “Wasn’t it Benz who invented driving?”

“I don’t know!”

Jisung sighed and leaned his head against the window. “Those are the words of someone who doesn’t know how to drive.”

“Hyunjin is the reason why vehicle manslaughter exists,” Changbin mumbled.

“I bet he got his license from the back of a cereal box.”

“Oh, nice one. I like that.”

“Thanks.”

“Geez. Might as well call me Timmy Turner ‘cause it’s fairly fucking odd how I get treated around here,” Hyunjin groused before he put the gear shift in reverse.

Hyunjin drove slow. Too slow. He kept glancing at the rearview and side mirrors, and let out a shriek whenever he panicked at a yellow light because he couldn't decide between speeding through it or stopping. Though he defensively answered that he indeed had a permit, Jisung could tell he barely took the wheel in his everyday life.

Jisung glanced over to Changbin, who had fallen fast-asleep and was snoring beside him. Jisung leaned his head against the window and watched the bright city lights and neon shop signs pass by him in a Gaussian blur. In the sky hung a choir of dimly lit stars covered by the city smog.

He sagged in his seat, cadaver-like, and closed his eyes. His head throbbed like a flickering heat pulse before the midnight sky took him back to his dreams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact: jisung was supposed to down a bottle of straight vodka instead of the party drink with absinthe, but then as u can see [here in this tweet i made](https://twitter.com/suncygnus/status/1336209839542788097), i am very Unfamiliar With The Effects Of Alcohol .... THANKS OLI <3 that being said, pls drink safely !


	3. poltergeist

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i was listening to [youth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZdsmLgCVdU&ab_channel=GlassAnimalsVEVO) by glass animals a lot as i wrote this, so i wanted to share :3c 
> 
> i don't think any warnings are needed (just some casual mentions of parental murder :D) but lemme know if there is! there'll be more interactions with the others in the next few chapters in case anyone was wondering!
> 
> thank you for all the support and wonderful comments!! <3

Jisung startled awake.

He’d been falling, in his dream, into some dark tunnel until light seeped through the cracks of cement and showed him the end of a well. He was plummeting straight at it waiting for the inevitable crunch of his bones when his body had flinched itself awake. He opened his bleary eyes and rubbed away the crusts of sleep, feeling his brain fall back into a flat battery.

He patted around his nightstand with cotton fingers for his phone to check the time, and found that it was half past eleven. Jisung had the mind to burrow back into his sheets, but the ache in his bladder had him reluctantly stumbling into the bathroom to relieve himself.

Jisung brushed his teeth and gargled mouthwash to get rid of the scent of death in his mouth. In the shower, he scrubbed his skin raw of yesterday’s grime underneath the hot water and thoroughly rinsed away the shampoo and conditioner from his hair. It smelled like rain and chamomile.

After he quickly got dressed into comfortable clothes, he let a towel hang around his neck and shuffled to the living room, where he spotted a pair of long legs peeking out from behind the couch.

Yesterday’s events felt like a dream, but Jisung had the kind of memory that didn’t let him think that way. He remembered everything clear as day even if he hadn’t been at his most lucid state. By the time they arrived back at their apartment, it was nearing two, so after Hyunjin had helped Jisung carry Changbin up three flights of strenuous stairs, Jisung offered the couch for Hyunjin to sleep in since it was too late for him to go home alone and the busses had stopped running.

And now, Jisung was looking down at him sleeping peacefully on the couch, if not in discomfort. Hyunjin’s neck was angled awkwardly to the side with the throw blanket pulled up to his shoulders, barely covering most of his body, and his eye makeup had smudged all over his face -- blue glitter sticking to his temples down to the line of his jaw. The sunlight pooled through the curtains and illumined his sharp features that softened in his sleep.

There was an eyelash on his cheekbone. Jisung stamped down the urge to reach forward and looked away. He went to the kitchen instead.

He downed a cup of water with aspirin and stared out the window. Since he had nothing else better to do, Jisung went ahead and took out a few eggs, some leftover vegetables that were starting to wilt, and tried to plan out a simple recipe in his head as he filled up the kettle with water to boil. He sliced tomatoes, red and spring onions, cremini mushrooms, and baby spinach; he cracked open the eggs and beat them up until it reached a consistency he liked, before he heated up the pan.

Jisung was a subpar chef, but at least he wasn’t a disaster in the kitchen like Changbin. Cooking wasn’t something he particularly enjoyed, or would voluntarily do, but he liked the repetitive actions and the level of concentration it needed from him. It gave his hands something to do when his thoughts sped ahead too fast for his body to process and catch up. Made him feel useful, in a way.

He cooked the onions and mushrooms first, before he added the spinach. Following that, he added the diced tomatoes and egg mixture, and lifted the edges up to allow the uncooked portion flow underneath when the edges began to set. Jisung sprinkled some shredded cheese in and was done with his first omelette when he heard a quiet gasp.

Jisung glanced up. Hyunjin, with the throw blanket wrapped around his shoulders, stood in front of the balcony door. There was a look of childlike awe that softened the permanent glare on his face.

“It’s snowing,” Hyunjin said.

Jisung slid his gaze out the window at the first snowfall of the year. It was the pure, white fluff, not the rainy kind, as the snow began to blanket over the roofs and streets, covering up the bare carapace of the city in a flimsy white shell. The snow danced around like sunlit glitter -- like the figure of contorted muscles and blue-white silk across the stage.

His dad never liked the snow. He preferred sunbathing out on their front lawn with a bottle and book in hand during the summer, though he was rarely sober enough to finish a page.

“You’re awake.”

“Oh,” Hyunjin said, looking over to him with a start. “Yeah, I -- uh, woke up to the exhaust fan. How's your head?”

“Peachy keen,” Jisung intoned, stirring around the vegetables. “Stay for a bit. I made food.”

Hyunjin was quiet. Then, he said, “Okay.”

Jisung set the heat on low when he went to grab a spare towel and a clean t-shirt for Hyunjin to change in. Jisung gave him a new toothbrush and a tumbler since it smelled like a possum had died in his mouth, and Hyunjin shot him a dirty glare while mumbling a reluctant ‘thank you’ as he went into the bathroom.

While Hyunjin washed up, Jisung quickly went back to salvage his omelette that had yet to burn in the midst of his absence. He was done with all three omelettes by the time Hyunjin came out of the bathroom, his bare face flushed pink from scrubbing his skin clean of makeup. The t-shirt was a bit short on him.

“Do you take milk or sugar in your coffee,” Jisung asked.

Hyunjin seated himself down on the table and cushioned a cheek with a palm. “Do you have almond milk?”

Jisung stared at him until Hyunjin sunk in his chair and mumbled, “What? Sheesh. I’m just an almond milk guy in a cow milk world. But I’ll take both, please.”

They ended up drinking their coffee black since the milk in the fridge had expired and came out in sour clumps. Jisung dumped at least six spoonfuls of sugar in his cup, ignoring the way Hyunjin watched him in utter disgust, and brought their breakfast to the table. He saran wrapped Changbin’s portion since he was still knocked out in his bed.

It was that morning did Jisung realize how much of a picky eater Hyunjin was. He ate the tomatoes and spinach, but scraped out the mushrooms and onions from the omelette, and though Jisung wasn’t a fan of vegetables as well, at least he ate his share. Hyunjin was the walking epitome of a health disease.

“Dude,” Jisung said, “aren’t you supposed to be some kind of health nut?”

Hyunjin dramatically gagged. “ _Vegetables_.”

“You have the palate of a five year old.”

“Says _you_ ,” Hyunjin retorted. “You’re the one who bought enough candy to last you two Halloweens.”

“Right, and you didn’t?”

Hyunjin turned a bit red and spluttered. “How did you -- I bought it ‘cause Jeongin wanted them! I’m not nearly as bad as you. I heard all about your sugar obsession from Changbin-hyung, like that one time you finished a whole box of Fererro rochers in a single day before moving onto chocolate hazelnut wafers and a tub of mochi ice cream. How are you even alive? And how does your metabolism still work so fucking fast?”

“God has his favourites,” Jisung said, moving his plate forward. “Here, give those to me, stupid.”

Hyunjin pouted at the name-calling but watched as Jisung switched out his own spinach and tomatoes with Hyunjin’s discarded mushrooms and onions. Hyunjin looked a bit more content at that, and started eating a bit faster rather than nibbling on certain parts of the omelette that didn’t have his least favourite vegetable.

They fell into a dazed silence as they ate. Jisung scrolled through his phone and skimmed through the news, and Hyunjin looked out at the window to watch the heavy snowfall. There was a gleam of wonder in his eyes, something akin to fondness, and Jisung couldn’t help but ask, “Do you like it?”

“Hm?” Hyunjin looked back at him. The wonder was still there. “The omelette? I mean, yeah. It’s not bad.”

“No. I meant the snow.”

“Oh.” He blinked. Then, his eyes crinkled, and he looked down. “Yeah, I love winter. Christmas is the best.”

Jisung was the opposite. Winter passed through him like a ghost and left behind a melancholic afterglow. He wished he could pluck the season out like a feather, but if he did, then he wouldn’t have seen the smile on Hyunjin’s face: open and unguarded, for once, when Jisung could easily twist that smile into a scowl with the right words. Jisung could ruin this moment of peace between them for the sake of ruining -- for the sake of seeing how bad it’ll make him feel to ruin something good and being the exact reason why he could no longer have it.

He poked his fork through a mushroom and popped it into his mouth. But maybe things were changing, when he chose not to.

“I like summer.” An admission. A truth.

Hyunjin tilted his head. “You do look like a summer guy.”

“And why is that.”

“I dunno. The sky’s the bluest during the summer, isn’t it?”

Jisung slowed down his chewing and stared at Hyunjin with careful eyes, feeling something unsettling churn in his stomach. _Dangerous_ , he thought. _Something disruptive. A catalyst._

He swallowed the food in his mouth and felt the ivy that had grown over the walls of his home begin to reach for the light on the other side. “Do you know why the sky is blue?”

“No, but I can like, search on Naver, or Google, or -- “

“The blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. The colour of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue. That means blue could be considered an accident produced by void and fire.”

Hyunjin blinked. He’d forgoed his utensils to cushion both sides of his face with his palms. “How long did it take you to memorize all that?”

“I didn’t memorize it.” The words were crystal clear in his mind, like the water droplets cascading down the strands of his hair. “I just read it in a book.”

Hyunjin opened his mouth, puzzled, but looked away when Changbin made his presence known by dragging his fluffy slippers in.

“You guys having a party without me or what?” Changbin yawned, his messy hair sticking up in askew angles from overnight gel. He had a hand inside his shirt scratching his stomach as he came to a stop at the table, surveying the plates of omelettes with mild fascination. “Wow, did you cook? _And_ you used vegetables? Who are you, dude?"

“They were starting to die in our fridge,” Jisung said. “Also, we need new milk. Direly.”

Changbin pulled a face as he went to grab his mug from the cupboard. “I’m surprised I didn’t wake up to you two trying to kill each other. Fuck, why does my head hurt so much?”

“He dropped you on the floor when we came back,” Hyunjin spoke up, though his eyes seemed to still linger on the conversation about the sky’s blueness before they were interrupted. “Might explain why your head looks kinda big today. Or maybe it was always that size.”

Jisung stroked his nonexistent beard thoughtfully. “Nah. His head’s always been too big for his ass.”

“Literally or figuratively?”

“Both.”

“Oh, come on, you fuckers. I just woke up and you’re already _bullying_ me,” Changbin complained in a shrill voice as he poured the lukewarm coffee into his mug. His unruly appearance made it harder to take him seriously. “I did nothing to warrant such disrespect! I clean, I do the laundry, I make sure there’s something edible in the fridge, and Jisung here only knows how to piss twenty years off of my life span.“

Hyunjin caught his eye from across the table as Changbin continued to rant about something ridiculous, and Jisung looked back, expressionless with just the barest hint of a raised eyebrow, and Hyunjin hurriedly drank his coffee to keep himself from spewing out his mouthful of food with laughter.

Jisung looked down at his plate and smiled. He sat there, listening to the both of them bicker about the mundane, and wondered if the mornings had always been so warm.

───

Jisung would see him at the most unexpected places, sometimes, like he was a sunflower in the desert.

Whether it be in a mall or a random cafe Jisung stopped by for coffee, he could never seem to outrun Hyunjin no matter where he went, as if the universe was somehow pulling the strings behind their coincidental meetings -- these permutations of the random, a moment’s potential Jisung destroyed instantly when he turned around and left before he could be seen.

He’d rather die than surrender control to a non-existence force.

They never brought up what happened at Yeonjun's party whenever they crossed paths during the meet-ups Jisung was forcefully dragged to. Jisung kept his word to Changbin and was less hostile in their brief, surface-level interactions, but he still maintained his passive distance. The more they knew about each other, the more their lives were entangled, and Jisung hated the thought of that.

His apathy and lack of civility had always been a dealbreaker for most people, and Hyunjin was the most vocal about it. It was funny, in retrospect, seeing Hyunjin so adamant about things he couldn’t understand when he himself was an enigma to Jisung.

“You didn’t have to be so rude,” Hyunjin said, watching the girl trudge back to her table dejectedly. “A simple no would have gotten your point across. Did you have to pick her apart like that? She was literally on the verge of tears.”

Jisung was acutely aware of how everyone had turned their heads to them. Chan, especially, was squinting at their mouths as he turned his right ear towards them. Changbin poured himself another shot of soju and Jeongin was too busy grilling the samgyeopsal to spare any ounce of interest in them.

“Dunno,” Jisung said, shrugging. “I just wanted to.”

"You just _wanted_ to?"

"Sorry. Did I stutter?"

Hyunjin was expressive -- both onstage and in person. Jisung knew that, because the twitch of a brow or a small tilt to his lips was enough to convey multitudes. He was easy to read and easier to provoke. It was kind of fun. “Dude, what she did was harmless compared to your jackass reaction. Do you act like a piece of shit for fun or were you just born that way?”

“You say that as if it’d hurt my feelings.” Jisung chewed the bean sprouts in his mouth slowly, already bored of the predictable conversation. “Can’t you tell? She wasn’t really interested. She just wanted an easy distraction from heartbreak. It’s all over her face. Oh, but you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you? What was your number again?”

Changbin let the soju in his mouth dribble down his chin. He muttered to Chan, who was relying on Felix to sign the long-winded argument for him, “Damn. Would it be bad if I wanted to see how they’d murder each other?”

“What? Did you just say you want to _marinate_ me?” Chan asked, confused, and winced when Changbin smacked him on the shoulder.

Hyunjin kept his eyes on Jisung, cold and hard, lips pulled into a taut line. “I’m starting to think that I model an exact representation of the people you detest.”

“You’re realizing that now?”

“Well, I thought maybe you just had some twisted sense of self-righteousness at first, but now I can see that you’re just a total heartless bastard.”

“I don't need a moral high ground to dislike someone ‘cause last I checked being a cunt wasn't illegal.”

“But showing people common decency and respect _is_?”

“The meat is done,” Jeongin interrupted in a clear, broad voice, promptly dispersing the tense atmosphere between them. “If you two don’t shut up right now, I’m eating all the pork belly.”

Felix seemed to agree with the notion. He caught Jisung’s eye and used his chopsticks to draw a line across his neck. _Cut it out._

Jisung shrugged and returned to his meal, but Hyunjin was still thrumming with indignance. It didn’t take long for him to break; he stood up abruptly from his seat, sending his chair skidding backwards, and snarled down at Changbin, “Why don’t you put a fucking leash on him?”

Then, he grabbed his jacket and stormed out of the restaurant, leaving behind a trail of stunned silence.

Jisung remained unbothered. As soon as Hyunjin left the vicinity, Changbin leaned forward and snapped his fingers at Jisung. “What did I tell you about being civil with him?”

“It’s boring.”

“Boring?” Changbin repeated in a clipped voice. “It’s _boring_?”

Jisung shrugged.

Changbin threw his arms up in exasperation, nearly knocking over his cup in the process. “So what? You’re just gonna pick fights with him all the time because it’s entertaining? We were doing so _well_. I didn’t raise you on my back for you to turn out like this!”

“Dude.” Chan pouted at him. “I raised him too. Where's _my_ credit?”

“Jisung -- uh, hyung,” Jeongin added the formality in a stilted voice as if it was an afterthought. “There’s much better ways of getting to know him other than pissing him off all the time.”

“Who said I wanted to get to know him?”

“Oh. So you don’t want to?

“I don’t want anything.”

Jeongin arched his eyebrows. “Wow, okay. I don't mean to be rude, but you’re just a raging dumpster fire truck of issues, aren’t you?”

“Um, alright. I mean. You have to admit,” Chan piped in, trying to mediate between the two before it turned hostile again, “we all have issues. Like, Innie. C’mon. You were a byproduct of a broken condom almost raised by a cult. Am I wrong?”

Jeongin puffed up his cheeks and crossed his arms. “You’re not, but still.”

Felix sent Chan an unimpressed look for turning the atmosphere dire before he waved at everyone to shut up and move on. The conversation now took a lighter turn thanks to Felix, who valiantly filled their cups to the brim with soju and egged everyone on to drink until they couldn’t stuff their stomach with delicious food anymore.

Jisung looked away and piled more rice into his mouth, stamping down the irritation creeping up on him and niggling at the back of his head. He gritted his teeth and swallowed the food. Restlessness buzzed beneath his fingertips. He was dragging his nails down the fabric of his jeans when Changbin placed a grilled pork belly on top of his rice, his face flushed in a tipsy glow but his eyes sober enough to look at Jisung in a more placating manner.

“I know you don’t actually hate him,” Changbin said.

Jisung mixed the pork belly with the gochujang he’d squeezed into his ramekin. “I told you I’m not easy to get along with."

“And are you proud of that?”

He set his chopsticks down. Picked it back up. Then set it down again, but on the other side of his plate. “No.”

Changbin sighed and glanced at the others before he scooted into Hyunjin’s seat so that he faced Jisung directly. He looked like he hadn’t downed a dozen soju shots a while ago. But Changbin had always been like that -- the overseer in the gravity of a situation, where he’d string Jisung up in a strong light and single out his bullshit. “Get him back in here, then.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Because I know you’re not the asshole you want everybody to think you are for God knows what reason. Talk to him right now, or else I’ll seductively lay across your lap and start crying.”

Jisung scratched the denim with his fingernail. He mulled over the request underneath Changbin’s heavy, unwavering stare, before he decidedly stood up and grabbed his coat. He ignored the curious looks the rest of the guys sent his way and ambled out of the restaurant.

Rock salt crunched beneath his feet. Jisung glanced up at the night sky that was the colour of wet ash, where the stars were concealed behind thick, rolling clouds, and his breaths came out paler than the snow. He rubbed his hands together. Winter was all about glacial silence and frostbites.

He spotted Hyunjin almost immediately -- a figure of black sitting on the curb of the sidewalk, hunched over himself and visibly shaking from the cold. It was a bit of a pathetic sight to see, but Jisung was also blowing warm air into his palms in an attempt to mitigate the cold, so maybe it wasn’t that bad if both of them looked pathetic and bleak together.

With a sigh, he approached him. Jisung sat down on the sidewalk and took out his pack of cigarettes to light one up. He offered the pack to Hyunjin, but this time, was met with a scathing look.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t punch your face in.”

Jisung took a deep, quick drag. “Hurting me emotionally would pay much higher dividends.”

“Try again.”

"The bullseye on my chin is not meant to be taken seriously.”

“Nope.”

Jisung felt his brow twitch. “I’d rather do it myself.”

“Yeah. Okay. I’d pay to see you punch yourself,” Hyunjin said, nodding in approval, before he reached forward and stole the cigarette that was dangling between Jisung’s fingers. He put it to his chapped lips and inhaled slowly, holding the burn in his lungs before he blew it out, the sharp edges of his profile framed by the wispy, transitory smoke.

Jisung looked away, but found his eyes drawn back to him. Hyunjin only wore silver barbells tonight -- the end of the earring that poked skywards through his upper cartilage shaped into a triangle so it resembled an arrow. The neon lights of shop signs reflected against the dark of his eyes -- the bar of blue at its deepest depths.

But then Jisung saw the perfunctory words forming at the shape of his mouth, and he grabbed Hyunjin’s sleeve to stop him from speaking.

“No,” Jisung snapped. Something flickered inside of him, for a moment. Something red and angry. Something acrid that sizzled and burned underneath his skin. “You’re not apologetic about it and neither am I. Don’t go and act all small for someone else’s comfort.”

Hyunjin looked startled. He gnawed at his bottom lip and wrenched his sleeve out of Jisung’s grasp. “You know, most of the time, you would leave the person you _don’t_ like alone. You don’t sit beside them and tell them to hold themselves at a higher esteem.”

“Looks like my roommate did a good job training me, huh,” Jisung said. “Bark bark.”

“You’re impossible,” Hyunjin hissed. “This whole hot and cold thing you’re doing isn’t cute at all. How does it feel to be such a garbage person?”

“Garbage person? I’ll have you know I am 100% recyclable. Biodegradable, in fact.”

“I really will punch you.”

Jisung took the cigarette back and tucked it between his curled lips. “But you won’t.”

Jisung knew, in the back of his head, that he should think of a way to get Hyunjin to come back inside to appease the part of him wanting to see the proud look on Changbin’s face. But the other part of him wanted to stay outside, just the both of them, because maybe it meant more this way -- sitting here, smoking in silence, tasting the same thing at the same moment.

Jisung looked out on the streets covered in dirty slush and soiled snow. Icy fractals spread across the windows of shops nearby. He was brought back to a time, maybe a few years ago, during the heart of winter, where buildings gleamed in passing underneath the constellations that shone through light pollution.

He was standing at Gangnam station, or he was sitting in a 24/7 convenience store, or leaning against the railing of the observation deck by a river, or walking aimlessly through the busy streets of Myeongdong in the early evening -- that strange, feeling of longing; that feeling as if something was missing from his life and would never come back even though it never existed there in the first place.

Jisung remembered every feeling of every memory stored in his head. _I would kill to have your kind of memory_ , most people said. _Not if it kills you first_ , Jisung thought.

“Hey. Tell me something interesting.”

Jisung slanted Hyunjin a dubious look. “Why?”

“Amuse me with your memory,” he said airily. "It's the least you can do for publicly belittling my character. Jerk."

Jisung hummed, tapping the ash away from the end of the cigarette. He listlessly recited the information he’d retained on a site about birds. “The northern goshawk is a medium-large raptor in the family Accipitridae. It leaves larger portions of their prey uneaten than other raptors. Many feathers and fur and other body parts are strewn near kill sites and plucking perches are helpful to distinguish their kills from other raptors such as large owls, who usually eat everything.”

“And let me guess,” Hyunjin said, mildly pleased, “you just read that somewhere.”

“Yup.”

“What about your job?”

Hyunjin sounded too genuine in his curiosity to be snideful. It was a little strange. Jisung shrugged and handed the cigarette back. “Well. Did you know you should never mix hydrogen peroxide and vinegar together? It creates peracetic or corrosive acid that can fuck up the skin and eyes and lungs and shit.”

“I thought it was obvious to not mix cleaning agents.”

“Clearly, I have a genius memory, but that doesn’t necessarily corroborate my general intelligence.”

Hyunjin laughed unevenly, turning his head away as he did so as if he could muffle the truth of the sound. But it was an honest kind of laugh, the one that made his eyes shine and disappear and voice trill like a warm ribbon of light.

“It’s useful for when you want to kill someone,” Hyunjin said lightly. “Slowly, of course.”

“Thanks for planting that idea in my head.”

“Actually, if you could kill anyone in this world, who would you kill?”

“Wow. These icebreaker questions of yours sure does create an awareness of ice.”

Hyunjin smiled a bit sharply. He took back the cigarette but didn’t put it to his mouth. He watched it burn instead like he usually did, eyeing the cherry ring at the end of the stick. “I’d probably choose my dad.”

Jisung let out a low whistle. “Getting a bit too honest here, aren’t we.”

It was _too_ honest, in fact, for somebody like Hyunjin who seemed desperate in wanting to maintain a pristine and innocent image, but he could never seem to maintain that well-curated veneer of his whenever it was just the two of them.

Jisung couldn’t imagine holding the same, violent thoughts towards his own dad, even if he had left Jisung too embarrassed about his own blood and its redness. He let resentment build up in his liver, ripped apart memories of those Galapagos sea lions but would look at childhood pictures to try and find a way back to them, and pretended his dad had died because it was easier to grieve over the dead than to grieve over the living.

“Yeah,” Hyunjin said quietly, eyes boring into his, “but you like that.”

 _I think you guys have a lot more in common_ , Changbin once told him. Jisung didn’t like how true it was starting to sound.

“Why didn’t you?” Jisung asked -- stupidly, maybe, but Hyunjin laughed and tried to hide it.

“Because I’d hurt a lot of people if I did.” Hyunjin looked amused at Jisung’s gall to ask such a question. “Besides, patricide obviously isn’t a moral thing to do -- though I’m not sure if I should be talking about morals to someone who’s supposedly done many illegal things.”

“Your dad must have done something bad enough that you want to kill him though, and you don't want to kill me, so I’m probably not as bad as your dad. I’m probably an absolute angel compared to him.”

“Hm.” Hyunjin handed the cigarette back. “Debatable.”

“Okay, so you _do_ want to kill me.”

“Ninety-nine percent of the time I want to punch you in the face.”

“I’m the last of my species, so you can’t,” Jisung said.

“You are so -- ” Hyunjin let out a frustrated sound to complete his thought, running a hand through his hair. But then he effectively changed the subject with the million dollar question: “Why’d you quit music?”

Jisung blinked at him in mild surprise, and his muscles immediately coiled into an aching stiffness. Changbin and Chan asked him the same, exact question every year, and Jisung still didn’t give them the answer they wanted.

He thought of the strings pressed against his calloused fingers that moved in sepia-toned muscle memory; the blue glitter cascading across the stage in lithe movements that invoked an unprecedented jealousy to gnaw inside of him. But then there was the other side of him, where he couldn’t even feel bothered about it, because he _chose_ this -- to become passive, to not invent, to not yearn. Jisung threw it all away; how could he ever ask for it back?

“Why’d you start drinking?” Jisung deflected, sounding more defensive than he intended. When he saw the look on Hyunjin’s face, he pushed himself up from the sidewalk with a curled lip. “Exactly.”

Hyunjin snatched his sleeve and tugged him back down. “Stop that.”

“Then stop asking me questions you know you won’t get the answers to.”

“I’m remembering why I don’t like you.”

Jisung gave a humorless smile. “I’m surprised you forgot in the first place.”

“Whatever.”

“It’s cold,” he said. “Go back inside.”

Hyunjin shook his head. “Not unless you apologize.”

“What?” he scoffed. “To you?”

“To the girl you rejected,” Hyunjin elaborated, unyielding in both stances. “She knew what she was doing better than anyone else, but that didn’t mean she deserved to be humiliated for it. You read people without warmth, Jisung.” The glacial brightness of his eyes fed on Jisung’s skin like frostbite. “That’s not what you do to people who are hurt.”

Expressive or not, Hyunjin was clever. He watched in silence and addressed things behind the scenes. He wasn’t the type to rip illusions apart with bare hands out of an impulsive need for self-sabotage like Jisung. He was in control, and control was the aspect he seemed to be the most confident in when he wasn’t trying to expand himself to accommodate others.

But most of all, he knew how to mirror back Jisung’s pseudo-apathy with a challenge, and that irked Jisung straight to his rotten core.

“Are you sure _you’re_ not the one trying to put a leash on me?”

Hyunjin smiled. “No, but I’ll put a muzzle on you instead. How about that?”

Jisung almost sneered. He turned on his heel and returned to the restaurant.

His ears were stinging once he was back inside, blasted by the heat of the aircon. At their table, Chan was currently arm wrestling Changbin for the last piece of meat on the grill -- both unaware of the fact that Jeongin had already stolen it. His eyes then wandered to the girl who was currently inhaling a bottle of chum churum all alone since her friends had urgently rushed into the restroom after having too many to drink.

Jisung glanced around his shoulder, where Hyunjin had walked through the door and was watching him with a neutral expression. Jisung might really, truly hate him and that stupid gullible heart of his and the light of his voice that bleached out the blues in his vision.

He clenched his teeth and swallowed it all back down. He stepped forward, heading back to his table, but at the last minute, pivoted in his direction and approached the girl instead.

At the sound of his footsteps, she looked up at Jisung leaning a hip against the edge of her table. She was flushed in the face but strangely sober, and her glassy eyes were wide at the sight of him. “Oh. You.”

“Yeah. Me.” Jisung hid his trembling fists into the pockets of his coat. He hoped his steady expression belied no discomfort. He’d never been good at talking, let alone to strangers he’d hurt in passing. “I’d be lying if I said I was here to apologize, because I’m not a really nice person. You wouldn’t have been happy with me even if it was just a one-time thing, but I could have been kinder in letting you down, at least.”

“You weren’t wrong,” she murmured, watching the soju swirl inside the bottle she shook. “I know I’m shallow, maybe fickle, and I have a fragile mentality. I mean, that's why I got dumped, wasn't it? Not that I really blame her, but I wish she’d at least let me say my part instead of blocking me on everything.”

“Oh.”

“I just wanted some attention. We all use people, don’t we? Always. _Constantly_. So why couldn't I, then? Just for tonight?”

“Probably should’ve hit on the guy across from me if you wanted a night of fun,” Jisung said, unsure of what he was supposed to say.

She eyed him from head to toe with a heavy-lidded glare. “Thought you were pretty.”

Jisung blinked. Without any thought, his eyes darted over to Hyunjin, who was now seated back at their table. He was watching Jisung with careful eyes, a polished brown in the hazy lowlights, a contoured figure dressed in slim-fitting black and silver jewels. Jisung looked back at her. “He’s pretty too.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I see, now.”

“See what?”

She smiled a bit. She set the bottle down and crossed her arms rather smugly. “Nothing. But, you’re right. You’re not a nice person. You were really unnecessarily mean. So, I hope you don’t get offended when I tell you to go fuck yourself.”

She had raised her voice near the end, making heads turn from neighbouring tables. Jisung was slightly surprised but mostly impressed by her spunk. He bared his teeth at her in a shark-like grin, and said, “Try a bar next time.”

She flipped him off, and Jisung left her table with a strangely light heart.

He returned to his own table, where the boys were staring at him in a way that indicated they were ready to pounce, although Jeongin regarded him with a more thoughtful look. Jisung sat down and nodded when Felix asked if he was okay.

“What was that?” Changbin asked eagerly. “What just happened? What was that?”

“I socialized,” Jisung replied.

“You don’t socialize,” Changbin snorted. “You piss people off and leave me to handle it like I’m your personal undertaker.”

Chan hummed and craned his neck to look at the girl who was laughing with her friends now, after they returned from the restroom. “She looks happier.”

Jisung noticed that they had piled the rest of the samgyeopsal and galbi onto his plate during his absence and refilled his ramekin with sauce. While the rest were diving into a ridiculous conspiracy theory behind Jisung’s rare, voluntary act of kindness, Jisung glanced up at Hyunjin, and felt warmth nestle down to his stomach when he realized Hyunjin was smiling at him.

His arms were propped up on the table, with one hand touching his necklace and the other hand curled into a fist pressed against his lips as if he was trying to hide it from everybody else but Jisung. It was gentle, almost delicate, from the way the corners of his eyes crinkled unevenly and the slight lift of his lips moved all his moles. Soft, almost imperceptible, and a somethingness that made Jisung’s insides churn like writhing pythons.

Everything in his head suddenly went quiet.

He felt the frostbite, the embarrassment of feeling, his fingers trembling at an ache underneath his skin that was close yet out of reach. Jisung didn’t know what to do, so he did what he did best: he looked away.

───

“You’re the best dongsaeng ever, Jisung-ah,” Chan cooed as he rammed his nose into Jisung’s neck when he brought him into a bone-crushing hug. “I’ll buy you lots of coffee whenever you want!”

Jisung grimaced at Chan’s penchant for unexpected affection. He wished he could have at least showered and changed, but Chan needed help moving into his new apartment -- one with scalloped balconies, soundproof walls, and possibly less ableist tenants -- and carrying up all that music equipment and furniture alone would have been torture.

It was a strange time of the year to be moving, but Chan never took time off to rest even during the holidays. He was a bit of a workaholic.

“Is it just us doing all the labour?” Jisung asked, heaving up one of the boxes from the trunk of his car. “I thought Changbin hyung was coming too.”

“Careful of the ice,” Chan warned while he lugged two boxes and led Jisung into the building. “Oh, he was, but he said he couldn’t make it. Something about his parents.”

“Are they giving him a hard time again?”

“When are they not?” Chan pointed at the door that led to the stairs when they noticed a sign plastered over the elevator that said it was out of order. “You’re totally gonna die.”

Jisung ignored the jab at his stamina. “I could always get rid of them.”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

“It’d be justifiable.”

Chan let out a long sigh. “No murder, please. Just punch them in the face if they ever have the nerve to show up, okay?”

For the sake of being childish, Jisung stuck his tongue out at him.

They spend the next hour or so carrying boxes and easy furniture up into Chan’s empty apartment, knocking disassembled shelves wrapped in bubble wrap against doorways. When Jisung became too winded to continue any more heavy-lifting, he collapsed onto the floor and felt all his muscles scream from the strain.

Chan’s new apartment was bigger in size, accompanied by large glass window panes and a broad view of the mountains that’d help with his vitamin D situation. Sunlight was something Chan was in dire need for; his focus on his craft often turned into impenetrable tunnel vision, and because he overworked and rarely took care of himself, such duties were delegated to his friends instead.

“See, if you quit smoking and went exercising with me, you wouldn’t be having this problem,” Chan gently chided, nudging his hip with a foot. He hadn’t broken a single sweat at all.

“I exercise,” Jisung weakly argued. “I hauled three boxes of detergent today from the loading dock.”

“That unfortunately doesn’t count, but luckily our back-up has arrived! Well, half of our back-up.”

Jisung was expecting one of Chan’s buff upperclassmen friends, or his coworker from the petrol station he worked at with the perma-scowl and broad shoulders, or someone who looked like they did weightlifting for a living in general, but the person who’d arrived panting for air in a disheveled mess was none other than Hyunjin.

Jisung should have expected it, really, but he was still unimpressed. “Seriously? What makes you think _he_ can carry your fat ass couch?”

“He’s in far more better shape than you,” Chan retorted, as they watched Hyunjin roll onto the ground in an attempt to catch his breath. “He had practice the entire morning, took the train, ran all the way here, and went up those gnarly flights of stairs just to help me. That’s the kind of example you need to set, ‘Sungie.”

“But I came to you straight after work,” Jisung emphasized. “I abandoned the opportunity of a _shower_ for you.”

“I greatly appreciate that, but you literally only carried two boxes, a shelf, and an amp before you proceeded to almost pass out on my living room floor.”

“It’s not like you were any better than me, Mr. I’m-so-strong-because-I-can-lift-three-thousand-pounds-or-whatever-a-day --”

“Guys, shut up. Shut _up_. I think I’m dying.” Hyunjin sounded like he was on the verge of tears as he rolled onto his stomach and wheezed into the floor. “Why the fuck are you on the sixth floor, hyung.”

That ended the spell of their light banter. Chan went off to grab water for Hyunjin who acted like he was a dying fish in need of priority, and Jisung ordered bingsu through his phone’s delivery app. Then, he sat down beside Hyunjin, opting to watch his dramatics as a form of entertainment.

“What’s your hate-o-meter at right now,” Jisung asked.

Hyunjin hummed in thought. He tilted his head up and peeked at Jisung through his curtain of hair. “Eighty-five percent, maybe.”

"Good," he said, “because I wanted to say that you look like you crawled out of a rat’s ass."

Jisung gracefully dodged Hyunjin’s hand when he tried to strike him. Frustrated, Hyunjin let out a loud, drawn out groan, and aggressively kicked his feet in the air, earning a concerned look from Chan when he shuffled back into the living room with a water bottle.

“Are you guys fighting already?”

“What?” Jisung feigned innocence. “We don’t fight.”

“I literally want to strangle him,” Hyunjin growled.

Chan sighed.

They carried up the last of Chan’s music equipment before their bingsu arrived. Jisung placed their strawberry and matcha desserts in the middle of the sparsely furnished living room, and distributed forks for the three of them to share. Chan decided it was a good time to recount his story of a creepy customer he encountered during his graveyard shift at the petrol station the other night.

Listening to their intertwined voices, Jisung looked out the window when the clouds untrapped the sun and allowed a stream of warm light to pool through the glass. He tasted the matcha mixed with condensed milk and the turpentine stuck to the fabric of his uniform that lingered in his nostrils and down to his palate.

He was late in realizing that the conversation had stopped. He glanced at Hyunjin, whose eyes were wide and his hands were urgently scrambling to tuck his daisy necklace inside his argyle sweater.

“Hey, Seungmin,” Chan brightly greeted.

Jisung’s gaze flickered to the young man standing by the doorway. He was dressed casually in a varsity jacket with a thick scarf wrapped around his neck, slightly covering his wind-nipped cheeks that were pink. He wore a yellow beanie that flattened his bangs and grazed just shy of his doe-like eyes.

“Finally, the other half of our backup is here!” Chan skipped over to throw an arm around his shoulder. “It’s been a hot minute, hasn’t it? How’ve you been?”

“Alive,” Seungmin said, and snickered when Chan was unamused at the answer. His gaze flitted to where Hyunjin was sitting cross-legged on the floor, and his weary eyes softened just a bit. “Hey.”

Hyunjin reached for his necklace only to remember he had hid it, so he passed it off as a wave, before his hands fell back to his lap to twist the silver rings around his fingers. His voice was uncharacteristically small. “Oh, um -- hey. I didn’t know you’d be here -- I mean, like, I didn’t think you’d help out, or something.”

Seungmin glanced at the bingsu and shrugged innocently. He walked towards the desserts, but with a limp in his gait that seemed to cause some sort of pain judging by the slight wince. “Maybe I’m just here to steal the food.”

“Sucks,” Jisung finally spoke after being forced to observe the awkward interaction between the two, “since I’m the one who bought them.”

Seungmin looked up at him. Jisung recognized those kinds of shrewd eyes, because Minho had the exact same ones, and Jisung was more often than not the recipient of scrutiny. But there was something else in the undercurrent of Seungmin’s eyes; he glanced at Hyunjin for a split second before he stuck out a hand and curved his lips into a pleasant smile.

“You must be Jisung,” he said. “I’ve heard interesting things about you.”

“And you’re Seungmin.” Jisung raised a brow and pocketed his hands. “I’ve heard interesting things about you too, lover boy.”

Seungmin’s brow twitched. Chan swooped in with an over-exaggerated laugh.

“And _I’m_ Bang Chan, and I need the rest of my stuff brought up to my apartment before someone steals my pedal mixers,” Chan declared, scooping up the last of the matcha bingsu into his mouth before handing his spoon to Seungmin. “You can eat the rest of the strawberry one. Jisung needs to cut down on the sugar anyway.”

“Since when was I doing that?”

While Chan prattled on about Jisung’s poor health and detrimental lifestyle, Seungmin began to bend down to take a seat on the floor. Hyunjin sprung forward with outstretched hands, trying to stop him. “Seungmin, your leg -- “

“I’m fine,” Seungmin interrupted, sharp and cutting. He kept his right leg out straight while he crossed his other leg. “I climbed those stairs all by myself. I'm pretty sure I can do something as simple as sitting down.”

Hyunjin took his hands back, biting the inside of his cheek. “You shouldn’t even _be_ here.” He turned to look at Chan with a hint of anger creeping up his voice. “Why the fuck did you ask him to come help when he’s not even fully healed?”

Caught in the middle, Chan darted his eyes between the two and opened his mouth to explain, when Seungmin curtly beat him to it: “Don't speak to him like that. It’s not his fault. I said I wanted to come and I’ve healed enough.”

“You can barely even walk on your own,” Hyunjin nagged with growing exasperation. “You’re gonna strain your injury, Seungmin. You should be at home or at physical therapy -- not _here_.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“Do you? Or are you just trying to prove yourself that you’re still capable of doing normal things when you can’t even -- “

“ _Stop_ ,” Seungmin finally snapped, his eyes flashing with a glaring coldness that didn’t fit right on his innocuous face. “You don’t get to do that. Not anymore.”

“Wow. Okay.” Chan laughed nervously as he lifted his hands between them to pacify the growing tension. “Um. Guys, let’s calm down now. Hey, Hyunjin, how about you and Jisung try to grab the couch while we finish up the ice-cream? Go burn off all the sugar, if you will.”

Jisung barely caught his jacket when Hyunjin tossed it to him, and stumbled a bit as Hyunjin snatched his sleeve and yanked him out of the room, all while wrenching his arms through the sleeves of his padded, winter jacket. Jisung glanced around his shoulder and found Seungmin watching him. Caught, Seungmin turned back around and continued heckling Chan who was in the middle of jumpstarting a discussion about environmental concerns.

It clicked.

He slowly put on his windbreaker, itching to peel away the phantom warmth of where Hyunjin's fingers had dug into his arm through his clothes. "If this is what you consider a better normal, then I suggest you go look up the dictionary definition of what it actually means.”

Hyunjin looked at him with a start. He opened his mouth, but Jisung shouldered past him and walked down the hall in brisk strides to head down the stairs.

The sky was a blue-tinted white dappled by petal clouds. Jisung skipped over the patches of ice on the sidewalk and trudged to his car parked along the curb, and instead of logically sitting inside to protect himself from the cold, he sat on the trunk and hiked up a leg against the ledge. Jisung watched vehicles drive by him, sending a flurry of slush that narrowly missed his leg, and lit up a cigarette.

Hyunjin joined him not too long later. He kneed Jisung’s leg aside to make room and perched beside him on the trunk. He chewed on his raw lips, hands thumbing the outline of the daisy charm underneath his sweater.

“You can gloat,” he said.

“I don’t care enough to gloat.”

“Then fine, I’ll do it. _Congrats_ , you were right,” Hyunjin muttered, shivering against a chilly gust of wind. “I don’t know. I was delusional for ever thinking things could go back to the way they were. How? When I’m like _this_ and he’s -- in pain.“

Jisung wondered when he became such a regular contender in getting dragged into other people’s affairs when he clearly had shown numerous times that he did not care. “When you’re like what.”

“I don’t know.” Hyunjin abstractedly motioned at himself. “When I’m like this. When I’m just -- _me_.”

“Okay. And you think running away and avoiding him would fix things between you two.”

“I don’t know what else to do.”

“Don’t go to someone for advice if you won’t take their criticism.”

“I’m not asking you for advice,” he scoffed. “Besides, as if that’d stop you. Shutting up isn’t really your forte.”

Jisung rolled his eyes to the side and let Hyunjin take the cigarette from his hand. Jisung folded his arms across his chest in contemplative silence and watched the clouds slowly travel across the sky like silent passengers. Minho had once held his bruised hands underneath the same, blue sky, when he decisively ended things between them.

Jisung turned to look at Hyunjin properly. His earrings were rose-gold today. “Just stay out of his business. You’re not tied to him in that way anymore, so stop acting like you are. It’s only going to piss him off. Let the dude work out his own anger issues.”

“He’s not an angry person,” Hyunjin said softly.

“No, he’s not,” Jisung agreed, remembering the way Seungmin’s voice had cut sharp but trembled like he’d swallowed glass. Anger was a big house where everybody lived alone. Anger was also one of the things Jisung was most familiar with down to the bare brittle of his bones. “But he can be, if you continue to feed into it.”

Hyunjin stared down at his shoes through the wispy cloud of smoke escaping his mouth. He took another long drag and dropped his hand from where it’d been playing with the charm of his necklace.

“It’s weird,” he said, “knowing that you’re kinda decent to me right now, but you’ll go back to being an asshole the next.”

“Not my fault,” Jisung scoffed. “You should know by now that I’ve never been a very nice person.”

“You really think that way about yourself?”

“You want me to lie and say I’m a saint instead?”

Hyunjin merely shrugged, tapping the edge of the car trunk. His voice had the same, billowing quality as the wintry wind. “If you were a saint, maybe you’d say yes if I asked you to compose a song for my spring showcase.”

Jisung laughed mockingly, but when Hyunjin remained serious, that was when he realized Hyunjin wasn’t joking around with his request. “Are you actually stupid?”

“Clearly, since I’m talking to you, but I’ve heard your stuff. Channie hyung showed me,” he said airily. “They’re good. I like them. It’s the kind of style I want to dance to. Something original.”

Jisung stared at the blue sheen of his eyes that sent something fluttering down his stomach. “You know damn well you’re asking the wrong person.”

“More like I’m asking a person who won’t admit that they still love something,” Hyunjin fired back. “You think you’re so good at hiding things, that you’re this unknowable matter, when it’s so obvious you -- “

 _Annoying, annoying, annoying._ “Say one more word and I will burn a hole through your sweater.”

Hyunjin flashed a pearly-white smile. “But you won’t.”

Jisung recognized the parroting and it only vexed him more. “No thanks. End of conversation. Ask me again and I might just kill you.” He stubbed out the cigarette and hopped off the trunk. He nodded towards the truck Chan had rented for his move. “Have fun with the couch.”

Hyunjin’s eyes bulged. All efforts in maintaining the current topic of the conversation was lost at the notion of lifting a three-hundred and fifty pound sofa all by himself. As Jisung went ahead, Hyunjin followed him hot on his heels. “What do you mean? I’m not carrying that thing up all by myself!”

“Should’ve thought of that before you started fighting with your ex.”

“We weren’t _fighting_. We were just aggressively talking.”

“Wow, delusional _and_ in denial.”

“Do you have this weird complex where you can’t function without offending people? You just _have_ to piss people off? Is that what you do? Like, you’ll just see some poor old lady on the streets and insult her dentures? Or if she asks you to help her cross the street, you’ll just tell her to fuck off to Rome and push her in front of a moving car instead?”

Jisung brought his wrist up that clearly did not have a watch to check the time. “Alright, it’s two o’clock. Don’t you think it’s time to fuck off?”

Hyunjin opened his mouth, affronted, but could barely get a word out when he stepped on a patch of ice on the sidewalk and almost slipped. Jisung instinctively snatched him by the waist to keep him upright after he stumbled forward from the momentary loss of balance. Hyunjin looked at Jisung with startled eyes and a faint blush began spreading across his cheeks.

Jisung let go immediately. “Guess you were treading on thin ice.”

“Oh, you’re an absolute comedian,” Hyunjin hissed. “Eat shit.”

When they returned to the apartment, they found Seungmin incapacitated in a headlock by Chan, who was affectionately smothering the younger with head kisses. Chan wasn’t surprised they came back empty-handed, so all of them decided to bring up the rest of his other belongings before they tackled the couch. At some point, Hyunjin pulled Chan aside to apologize for the way he spoke to him earlier, and was barraged by a stream of forgiving nose nudges. 

Midway through as Jisung brought in the last of the amps, Chan sidled up to his side and gently bumped their shoulders together. “Hey. How’s it going?”

“I feel like passing out,” Jisung replied gravely. “I’m never reaching deep into the depths of my itty bitty heart just to help you move furniture ever again.”

Chan chuckled, and watched in silence as Seungmin tidied all the vinyl records that had scattered over the floor after an unruly drop. He let out a barely audible sigh. “Do you think it’d be going too far if I set them up for, like, couple’s counselling, but not really for couples but more for exes?”

Jisung rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. “I don’t care and I don’t want to hear it.”

“It’s really hard to hang out as a whole group, now,” Chan continued, ignoring Jisung’s dismay. “We’re all kinda divided and you know how much I hate taking sides. Seungmin won’t show up to things if Hyunjin’s there and Hyunjin won’t talk to him properly. He’s not good with confrontations, especially when Seungmin has become such a ticking time bomb.”

“You guys mentioned his injury,” Jisung said, coming to a realization that he would inevitably get involved no matter what.

“Yeah." Chan clicked his tongue. "He took a bad collision at home plate and fractured his right femur really badly.”

“He can’t play anymore, can he.”

Chan hummed in thought. “I don’t know,” he admitted quietly. “But Seungmin’s a diligent guy. He always takes care of himself first before anyone else, and that’s always been a quality I admired about him the most. He’ll play again one day. I’m sure of it.”

Hyunjin pulled in a desk through the door, ramming it into the walls that made him flinch from the loud noise, before he angled it enough for it to fit through the threshold. Jisung looked back at Chan and said, “I know what you’re going to ask me, and the answer is no. I don’t care about either of them enough to help you fix them.”

“Really,” Chan said, raising his brows. “I was kinda under the impression that you care quite a bit.”

“Well, you’re wrong.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, now go away, geezer.”

Chan flashed him a wily smile. “Huh. Silly me.”

(The couch ended up not fitting through the door. Chan sighed and called it a day.)

───

The holidays passed by uneventfully.

Jisung never really liked the holidays after he became old enough to understand that his dad’s grief had turned into a sickness and had spread it to Jisung too. So, he spent this year’s holiday break like every other year: by smoking through packs to rid himself of ennui, watching horror movies that bored the shit out of him, and trying out new hot chocolate recipes that’d assuage his sugar cravings.

Changbin didn’t do much other than drink rum straight out of the bottle in the early hours as a way to cope with his parents. They picked up lonely branches of varying sizes from the sidewalks, painted them silver, and stuck them in a pot with dirt, before bringing it inside to their apartment to hang keychains on as their makeshift tree. Just because.

“God, we’re so sad,” Changbin complained, cradling the bottle of rum in his arms like a baby. “While Felix is throwing it back to Mariah Carey in Australia, we’re just stuck here watching kids cook better than us.”

“His entire family is a cesspool of drama,” Jisung said, wrapping the throw blanket tightly around his shoulders. It was still cold despite his layers of sweaters and fuzzy socks. “Pretty sure he told me about the time his cousin doxxed another cousin and almost got their mother killed.”

“What the fuck.”

“Exactly.”

On the other hand, while they were on the Grinch side of the festivity spectrum, Jisung found out that Hyunjin adored Christmas. Changbin had shown him their group chat where Hyunjin had shared a photo of his apartment decked out in gaudy decorations and sparkling lights, with Jeongin posed in the middle beside their miniature Christmas tree wearing an ugly reindeer sweater.

Selfies followed after it. There was a blurry one with Hyunjin caught mid-laughing, eyes pinched shut and cheeks rosy.

“You should rejoin it,” Changbin said. He sent a string of Santa emojis followed by eggplants, then sent it, which garnered a collective explosive disgust from the rest of the group.

Jisung pretended to think about it. “No thanks.”

They ate leftover pizza for dinner and watched a rerun of some variety show starring Yoo Jae-suk on the television. Changbin didn’t eat much, which was uncharacteristic of him since his appetite was perpetually hearty, and seemed to have fallen asleep when Jisung got up from the couch to head out to the balcony.

Jisung didn’t stay out too long, though. Rain washed the stars down from the night sky and into the drains of the frosted roads. Jisung stubbed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray and quickly slid back into the apartment as the orchestra of rain pelted against the roofs and melted the snow down into an icy residue.

When he returned to the living room, Changbin was awake again, but not necessarily sober. His eyes were glazed over at the muted television. Jisung kneeled down in front of him, plucking the empty bottle out of his arms, and tried not to find a resemblance in the scene.

“It’s midnight,” Jisung said. “Christmas is over. You’re gonna be hungover.”

“You’ll never be hungover if you’re drunk.”

Jisung rolled his eyes. “You should head to bed, hyung. You’ll be more comfy there.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You’ll be alone if I go to sleep,” he mumbled. “You’re always alone.”

“Doesn’t matter. You don’t have to -- “

“I heard you said no to Hyunjin when he asked you to help with his showcase,” Changbin interrupted him, speaking with laggy hand gestures. “Why? You know it’s not the same without you, ‘Sungie. It’s not the same anymore. Not when you left. It should be the three of us, not two. We’re meant to be three. It doesn’t feel right. _Music_ doesn’t feel right. We’re supposed to be making music together for a long, long time, but then you changed.”

“People change.”

“Not like that!” Changbin stubbornly exclaimed. “You threw _everything_ away. You threw music away and you _love_ music! How could you do that?”

He glanced down at his hands, where the bleeding white scars across his knuckles served as an eternal reminder of when he’d split them open against a brick wall. “I don’t love it anymore.”

“Bullshit,” Changbin spat, jabbing a finger at Jisung’s chest. “You’re a shitty liar, Jisung, because that is such fucking total bullshit and you -- “

“I’m not lying,” Jisung denied. Half-truths. “I _hate_ it. I hate it _so_ much that you wouldn’t even begin to understand. But it doesn’t matter if I threw everything away or not because there's still nothing left for me to do. Without it consuming my life, there’s just all these days and I don’t know what to fill them with anymore, so maybe I’m just actually trying to fucking shorten it.”

Changbin fell quiet. His eyes had a sober clarity to them for someone who downed an entire bottle of rum. “Your self-sabotage game is higher than a bunch of stoners.”

“I know.”

“Someone like you -- Jisung, you’re _made_ for it. For music.”

“It’s too late.”

“No it’s not,” Changbin declared, pointing at where he thought the clock was when it was the lucky cat figure his sister had bought for him as a souvenir from Japan. “It’s only twelve!”

Jisung sighed, tugging at his arm. “Go to sleep already, pisshead.”

“Will you at least think about the thing with Hyunjin?”

“No.”

Changbin whined. Jisung quickly assuaged him with: “We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

They did not talk about it in the morning.

Changbin didn’t remember anything after he passed out in his bed. Jisung messed with him by saying that he took a piss out the balcony and almost peed on a kid trying to build a snowman. Changbin sprayed whip cream at Jisung’s face when he realized Jisung was joking.

It was fine. Jisung had hoped Changbin would have forgotten about it by the time he woke up, because Jisung couldn’t bring himself to talk about it again. His silence was an answer itself. His silence was where all the drowned things lived.

They were all haunted houses. He lived in his dad’s absence like it was a house all the time. He lived with the memory of what his dad had done, with the ghost of his fingers that once held the guitar now inhabiting the rotting corners of his closet stuffed beneath heaps of trampled moments. Jisung let what ruined his dad ruin him, too, because he didn’t know how else to bring him back.

Jisung wasn’t strong. He wasn’t brave. He discarded music because it was an extension of his dad’s heart. He let the letters pile up underneath his bed because amidst all that wine--aged anger was grief, so it was better to not feel at all -- or, at least, to pretend he didn’t.

For a moment, he thought of the brush of lithe fingers, the bluish voice like crystal bells. To want was to rot.

In the sheer, wintry morning, with the light peeking through the curtains, Jisung looked at Changbin in the sunspot and remembered how Changbin was there when Jisung ripped apart all their sheet music; to hold him back from destroying his own hands; to take him back home the morning after his drunken blackout that left behind permanent fingerprints over the hearth of his home.

Changbin was there when he didn’t need to be. Changbin was there for a lot of things. And Jisung hoped that, one day, he’d have enough courage to finally pay him back with the full truth.

But for now, he flicked him on the ear.

───

A few days after the new year, Jisung drove to the airport to pick up Felix. It was early in the morning with diffused light softly scattered across the sky, and the mountains were a deep-jet blue against the stealthy rise of the sun. Felix knew he wasn’t a morning person, so Jisung was grateful when Felix showed up with a hot cup of coffee he’d bought from the airport’s Starbucks.

As Jisung took the highway home, Felix used his phone’s text-to-speech function to talk about the holidays spent with his family, which resulted in a full-blown fight between extended in-laws when extramarital affairs were exposed in the middle of Christmas dinner. Though it was loud and messy, Felix took the opportunity to eat all of his mother’s freshly baked apple pie when everyone had been distracted by his aunt brandishing a butcher knife at her son-in-law.

“ _I tried to record the whole fight, but my phone was running out of storage_ ,” he -- or Google Assistant -- said. “ _At least they didn’t pry about my personal life. I usually have to repeat myself every year that I’m not really into women whenever they ask if I have a girlfriend yet._ ”

“Say you’re dating someone famous like, I dunno, Park Seo-joon. That’ll get their attention.”

Felix slanted him an affronted look. “ _Do you want them to think I’m delusional? My relatives literally have a shrine of him in their living room. It’s bigger than the altar they set up for my dead grandpa._ ”

“Right. Of course they do,” Jisung intoned. He abruptly braked at a red light when he decided not to speed through a yellow. “I won’t be surprised if I see you and your family on the news one day.”

Felix laughed.

They stop by an European-style bistro to grab a quick bite since Felix didn’t eat much on the plane. He ordered a prosciutto flatbread with yam fries, along with a sweet potato latte, and watched in pain as Jisung dumped a bunch of sugar into his second cup of coffee of the day. Felix made cute, happy noises at his food, and showed Jisung videos of his mother’s cross-eyed chihuahua back at home.

“What’s he called?” Jisung asked, watching the chihuahua chew at somebody's hand.

Felix finger-spelled: “ _Bark Twain_.”

Jisung stared at him. Felix beamed innocently and slurped his latte.

They brought their plates to the bins and cleared off their table before they returned to the car. Felix lived in the studio apartments that were off-campus but still nearby, and made some passing comment about how Hyunjin lived in the same complex too.

“ _You’re welcome to come up to visit_ ,” Felix said. “ _It’s usually hard for him during this time of the year so I’m sure he’ll appreciate the company. Maybe you can get him to eat an actual meal_.”

Jisung scoffed at the idea of visiting. “What makes you think he’d listen to me or appreciate my company? Pretty sure I’ll give him an aneurysm instead.”

“ _You have a very unique way of inspiring people_.”

“Yeah, no thanks,” he said. “The guy’s a grown adult. He can take care of himself.”

Jisung could feel Felix’s eyes bore into the side of his face. He ignored him and maneuvered through sets of roundabouts that took him further into the less busy parts of the neighborhood. Arriving at the apartment complex, Jisung stopped in the middle of the road and turned on his hazard lights when there were no parking spots available along the curb. He reached down beside his seat and popped open the trunk.

Felix unbuckled the seat belt and blew Jisung a kiss. But then he showed Jisung his phone screen: _He’s on the fifth floor, room 540._

Jisung didn’t say anything. Felix jumped out of the car and grabbed his luggage from the back. He gave Jisung a big wave before he made his way towards the building. Jisung sped off and tried to erase the numbers out of his mind.

When he returned to his own apartment, he found everything had been cleaned spotlessly. Changbin emerged from the bathroom wearing a floral apron, pink rubber gloves, and a headband with bunny ears pushing his midnight-blue hair back.

“New year, new me,” Changbin said with an unnecessary amount of pride, twirling around for Jisung to check him out. “I’m a changed man, bro. No more leisure drinking until the parties hit. Would you collect rocks with the new me? Be honest.”

“No.”

Changbin tugged a glove off to chuck it at him. “I knew you’d say that. Bitch.”

Jisung threw the glove back. Changbin caught it with ease and slipped it back on. “Thanks for cleaning.”

“I feel like a housewife, sometimes, except neither of us are the breadwinners and you’re more like the freeloading piece of shit cousin that constantly gets me in trouble.”

"What?" Jisung picked at his ear as he shuffled into the kitchen. He hiked up onto the counter to reach for the highest compartment of their cupboards to grab the bag of sweets Changbin had unsuccessfully stashed away from him. “Sorry. Did you say something? I couldn't hear from all the usual bullshit coming outta your mouth!”

“Yeah!” Changbin shouted from behind the walls. “Fuck you!”

Jisung laughed dryly. “You’re not my type!”

He heard some more unintelligible cursing as Changbin retreated to the bathroom to finish up cleaning. Jisung smugly opened up the wrapper of chocolate and popped it into his mouth.

And so, time slipped by. The days were so alike Jisung barely noticed the weeks pass.

Jisung returned to work after his break was over and fixed his sleep schedule in order to accommodate most of his night shifts. At the start of the new semester, Changbin decided to replace their living room coffee table with a kotatsu after he’d been enticed by one of those pop-up ads on Instagram while freezing to death in his room. Jisung didn’t think it was worth it at first, but once he’d given it a try, Jisung decided that he found his new napping place.

Changbin never stopped chastising him about his lifestyle habits following the arrival of a new year. Jisung slept either too much or too little or not at all. He dreamed of pale memories soaked in inexplicable urban sadness. He made up things he’d never say and said them quietly underneath his blanket. He wondered when he’d finally feel like a fully realized person. He let music remind him of slow hours heavy with regret whenever Changbin showed him a new song in progress. He forgot that breakfast and dinner were existing concepts for most.

Days went by. He did nothing but underline the damp cloth pulled over his body reminding him of the life he crushed in his hands.

But one day, when he was home alone, he got out from the kotatsu at a gentle knock on the door. Jisung went to open it and was greeted by a smiling Ms. Kang, bundled up in her layers of damask scarves and a green fur coat.

“Hello, dear,” she said warmly as she held up a padded envelope for him to take. “I’m sorry to bother you on such a fine day, but it seems like the mailman put this in my parcel locker by mistake.”

“Oh.” He ran a thumb over the unfamiliar sender. “Thank you.”

She smiled and patted him lightly on the cheek, before she returned to her own unit. Her hand had been cold and rough but gentle.

Jisung leaned a shoulder against the wall as he looked down at the padded envelope. He didn’t recognize the name and the address was oddly familiar, and he shook it lightly to gauge what could be inside. Mildly curious, he tore it open with his thumb hooked underneath the adhesive flap, but overestimated the needed strength when he accidentally ripped the envelope along the seams that sent the contents spilling out onto the floor.

The first thing he noticed was the smell: musty, like something left forgotten in the damp corner collecting dust. But he no longer paid attention to the waft of it when he saw his five year old self smiling up at him from the floor.

They were photos. Countless of them. And among the sea of photos was a leaf of parchment paper -- a letter written by somebody who now lived in the house he and his dad once occupied during the cusps of his childhood.

> _To Han Jisung-ssi,_
> 
> _In accordance to your father’s wishes, I’ve dug up the things he’d left behind in the attic and will be sending the rest of them to you once I have the time._
> 
> _These photos were not in an album, therefore unpreserved. However, if you wish to get rid of the smell, I suggest to put the photos in a clean plastic storage container with bowls of baking soda and then put the top on the container. You would then replace the baking soda every 30 days._
> 
> _Best,_  
>  _Kwon Min-sik._

The words went blurry. He hadn’t realized his hands were shaking so much that he could barely see what was written properly anymore. He crumpled the letter in his hands and tossed it aside.

Jisung sifted through the old, faded photos, unable to recognize his own self. There was one where he had just started pre-school, flashing a gummy smile at the camera all chubby-cheeked and bright-eyed. There was one with just him and his dad holding a guitar on the day Jisung won a summer music competition for youths. There was one of his mom in her sunflower dress, taken the day she brought home a bowl of orange blossoms. There was a photo of his mom’s camellias that died by Jisung’s hands when he had watered it too much, teaching him that love could be violent. There was a wedding photo of his parents, holding Jisung in the middle like a wayward sun.

There were so many that Jisung felt like he was drowning in them and panicking from the enclosing weight.

“ _Hannie-ah_ ,” his mother’s voice resounded so brightly in his head, as if a beam of sunshine had been melted into sound. Her and her bowl of orange blossoms stared up at him. “ _Will you take care of him for me, when I’m gone?_ ”

Jisung laughed bitterly. He did a pretty shit job at that.

His mother’s words never died with her. They scattered around, looking for meaning to attach to like a scent -- like a sound. Grief was not a noun, but a verb. It moved endlessly. But to Jisung, it was more than that. Grief was a neighborhood where everybody he loved lived in. Jisung was stuck there, in his house of cards, digging graves for ghosts and the ghosts of a ghost and perhaps for himself.

He squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn’t bear to look at them anymore, at what was left behind and taken from him. He was so overwhelmed that he might have screamed. Maybe he did. He couldn’t tell. Jisung shovelled everything back into the envelope with a kind of wretched desperation and shoved it all into the trash can.

Then, he was out the door.

Jisung didn’t know where he was going, where he _could_ go, but he continued to run aimlessly down the icy streets, turning corners and crossing roads without a destination in mind. His limbs moved like some stupid, clockwork doll, with his feet sinking deep into puddles of melted snow. If he ran a little bit faster, he’d be a blur, then no one would be able to see how much of a mess he was.

By a cold, sickening impulse, he ended up at a bench in front of a teahouse, crammed between a store that sold handmade hanji paper and a modern eatery. Jisung kept his eyes pinned on the ground and pinched his fingers into his hands to stop them from shaking.

Was it possible to forget how much he loved someone? But to scoop his heart out would feel like slaughter. But maybe it was already slaughtered, when it had filled with fruit flies to signify death and decay. Love had always been something heavy for him, after all -- something he had to carry, like a burden.

A long time passed. Distantly, in the cotton canals of his brain, he was afraid of frostbite when he realized he wore nothing but a t-shirt, a pair of sweatpants, and threadbare slippers that were sopping wet at the bottom. But he liked it -- the cold that bit through his skin and stung like a thousand needles. If he froze here, numbed down to the blackened flesh, maybe the ache in his chest would stop. Maybe everything around him would stop with him. Just _stop_.

Jisung closed his eyes and listened to the rough sounds of traffic, the murmurations of strangers that walked past, the pop music that poured into the streets from the boutiques, the odd lilt of a familiar voice calling his name and --

Wait.

He opened his eyes. In front of his slippers were a pair of frayed, blundstone boots. Jisung could hear his dad telling him to look up, because that was what he was supposed to do when he looked down at his shoes, even if his slippers were everything but reflective.

“You’re insane,” the voice said.

Jisung didn’t need to look up to know who it was, but he did so anyway.

Hyunjin appeared worse for wear. The creases around his eyes were like engraved sunbursts, and his face looked thinner than before -- almost sunken in, from a lack of proper rest. His lips were pale and chapped except for the slits of red that were formed by incessant picking, but he looked warm, at least, from his thick coat and fluffy earmuffs and blue mittens.

Jisung laughed without humour. “Oh, fuck off.”

“You’re _insane_ ,” Hyunjin stressed in a clipped voice. He unwinded his scarf and draped it over Jisung’s shoulders. It smelled faintly of cedarwood. “Are you actually trying to freeze to death right now?”

“It’s a new year tradition. Did you follow me again?”

“Insane _and_ arrogant,” he scoffed, before jostling the paper bag in his hand to let Jisung hear the rattle of pills. “Pharmacy.”

Jisung recalled what Felix had said when he picked him up from the airport. He took a measured look at Hyunjin’s weary face, then to the bottled pills he had in his hands, and connected the dots instantly. “What happened in January?”

Hyunjin blinked in a show of surprise, before his face completely shuttered.

“You don’t get to ask that when you’re out here in nothing but pajamas,” he answered coldly. “Shouldn’t you be the one telling me why the fuck you decided to take a walk dressed like that?”

“Well, it’s just like you said -- it’s ‘cause I’m insane. Downright hysterical.”

“Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“You’re deflecting,” Hyunjin said, taking a seat beside him on the bench. He crammed the bag of pills into his pocket before he took off his mittens and offered them to Jisung to wear, but Jisung didn’t move. He merely stared at the blue mittens, feeling his stomach whorl at the prospect of holding the colour of his childhood in his hands.

“A man can only have so many issues,” Hyunjin muttered, reaching forward but stopping short of actually touching his hand. “Can I?”

Jisung tore his gaze away from the blue and glanced up at him. Hyunjin shouldn’t have known to ask that, yet he did, and Jisung wondered just how much of an easy read he was to other people. He didn’t know whether to be angry, or to keep calm, because a kettle couldn’t release steam and be cold all at once. He gritted his teeth so hard that his jaw hurt.

“Can you _what_.”

Hyunjin sighed through his nose. “Touch you.”

"Why are you asking?"

Hyunjin shrugged. There was a steel of ice in his puffy eyes -- maybe a hint of understanding behind all that bravado. "You don't like being touched."

Jisung balled his cracked, trembling hands into fists. He watched the thin lines on his skin -- gnawed by the cold -- split just slightly, allowing the thin film of red to seep through. When Jisung watched it bleed enough, he looked back up at Hyunjin and gave a curt nod.

Hyunjin held him like he was a ghost apple: an icy shell of what had been a rotting apple still hanging on the tree, molded by freezing rain -- all delicate fingers and insecure touches. His hand was warm, searing through Jisung’s cold, broken skin, as he pried Jisung’s hands open and straightened his fingers to allow the mittens to slip through.

The inside was still warm from where Hyunjin’s own hands had once occupied. Blue was not supposed to be warm.

When Hyunjin let go, Jisung realized that was what it felt like to be touched by another person's heat and not from his car. He was starting to think that he was not trembling from the cold but from the lingering ghost of Hyunjin’s hand sinking deep into his skin.

“I think we’re all a bit insane,” Hyunjin said, rubbing his chapped hands together. "Someone said this to me once, so maybe it'll help you too: humans can totally be bent out of shape, beyond unrecognizable, but they'll always return to their original form no matter how long it takes, like those springs made of steel." 

Jisung stared at him, heart in his throat. “Did you just use my own words to try and _comfort_ me?”

"Nevermind. Go freeze and die for all I care."

“Truth for a truth,” Jisung said instead, wanting to see how much he could push. “Tell me about January and I’ll tell you what happened.”

If there was an expression for mentally deleting an angry paragraph, it was whatever Hyunjin was doing with his face just then. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Why do you care?”

“I don’t. I’m bored.”

“Then go _home_.”

“So you don’t want to know why I’m out here in the freezing cold like this?”

“No, but I figured from the look on your face that you were seconds away from a breakdown. That’s enough of an answer for me.”

Jisung curled his lip. “Funny.”

“You know what else will be funny? When I call Channie hyung,” Hyunjin threatened in a light tone, pulling out his phone. “He’s gonna be super upset and worried, and then he’s gonna drag Felix into driving him all the way out here to pick you up, and he’s gonna wrap you up in five blankets and feed you a bunch of hot, _vegetable_ soup and maybe take you to the hospital to make sure you haven’t reached stage two of hypothermia -- “

“Fine,” Jisung snapped, standing up from the bench. “I’m going.”

Hyunjin smiled, wiggling his pink-tipped fingers. “Bye bye, now.”

He ignored all the weird looks he received by passing strangers, but midway down the street, Jisung chanced a glance over his shoulder. Hyunjin was still sitting there at the bench, blended among the crowd with his trendy white coat, yet recognizable by the invisible scar he wore on his face in a sea of faceless strangers. He’d always be earmarked by it -- the wound he seemingly severed apart from his identity, but still embodied no matter what.

Jisung gave a salute. Hyunjin looked away.

“Are you fucking _insane_?”

“Funny,” Jisung said, “that’s the second time I’ve been asked that.”

Changbin stood there at the door, handing him a towel as he snatched the slippers from his feet to put in a bag to avoid dragging the wet, muddy footprints inside their clean apartment. He rushed Jisung inside and wheedled him into sitting in the kotatsu first before taking a warm shower, and made him a hot cup of tea.

“You’re gonna get sick going outside like that,” Changbin chided, looking confused at the blue mittens and scarf he'd taken off. “Are those yours? I’ve never seen you wear them before.”

“No,” Jisung answered.

Changbin eyed him a bit more closely. “Something happened, right?”

“What makes you think something happened?”

“You’ve got this stupid look on your face,” he explained unhelpfully. “Also because Ms. Kang told me she heard you scream before slamming the door shut. She was a bit worried.”

Jisung didn’t say anything. He looked at the smoke billowing from the tea, warming up his windburned cheeks, and at the surface of the tea did he see his rippling reflection. A kind of numbness had spread over his face like oil poured on still water. He looked wrong. Unrecognizable, even, as an adult. He looked less like a tired living being and more of a well-preserved corpse.

When he thought of the photos now stuffed in the trash can -- of the faded portraits and polaroids with him flashing a toothy grin at the camera, eaten by mothlight, it left lumps in his throat like pin bones of a fish.

As a child, he thought love could save anything: if he loved his dad hard enough, it could save him; if he loved his mom hard enough, it could bring her back. But his mother never came back -- her camellias died when he poured too much love in it and his dad eroded into a sullied, grieving creature with blood on his hands.

Jisung could have stopped his dad from spiraling down into his own dark tunnel. He could have said better words -- the _right_ words. He could have done so much more than just love it all away, because love was violent. Love was a burden. And love didn’t save anything. Grief was the price of love and Jisung was left behind like a burning bridge in the sky so he could shoulder all of it. And he hated it _so_ much.

“Jisung,” Changbin gently urged. “Breathe a little.”

He sucked in air when he realized he hadn’t been breathing. “I think I’m insane.”

“You’re not insane.”

“Do you know about northern cardinals?”

Changbin frowned. “The what now?”

“They’re colloquially known as the redbird, but there’s a rose gold northern cardinal that has obvious abnormal coloration due to xanthochromism, or an overproduction of yellow pigmentation. They’re like the sun, hyung. Golden and bright.” Jisung brought a fist to his chest, again and again. “I want to be like that. I want to be yellow inside and not blue, because it’s always the blue talking. Blue this, blue that -- blue, blue, _blue_. ”

Changbin was beside him, suddenly, covering his fist with his warm, calloused hands. “Why is it blue, Jisung?”

“It's my dad’s favourite colour,” he croaked. “So I made it mine too.”

“Where is he now?”

Jisung shut his eyes. Blue bottle, blue tourniquet, blue knife.

“You can’t carry it around with you forever, Jisung,” Changbin whispered. “It’s gonna eat you up inside -- no, it’s _already_ eating you up. It’s painful to watch you live like that, knowing that I can’t do anything to stop it. Why won’t you tell me what happened to you?”

“I can’t.”

“Or you won’t?”

“You’ll hate me.”

Changbin laughed a bit sadly. “I think I love you too much to ever hate you, dude.”

Jisung gritted his teeth. “You can’t say that.”

“ _I_ can say whatever I want. But you? I’ll let you off the hook. I won’t force you to talk if you don’t want to -- but, Jisung, know this: you might think whatever happened to you was probably the worst thing to have ever happened to you, but you’re wrong. It wasn’t. It wasn’t the worst thing to have ever happened to you.” Changbin said, clutching his hands tightly. “ _Hating_ yourself for it was.”

Jisung looked up at him, then, as Changbin held him in all his titan glory -- a pillar of silent strength and courage. He felt the ice thaw.

“I know what it looks like -- blaming yourself for things you couldn’t control. I’ve seen it on my own face. I’ve seen it on Channie hyung’s face, on Seungmin’s face.” Changbin smiled a bit. “And it’s the same face Hyunjin wears everyday, just like you.”

“His face is stupid.”

Changbin scoffed. “So is yours. But that’s the thing, man. I don’t know what you’re hating yourself for, but you gotta stop that. Stop beating yourself up all black and blue inside. Rewrite that bad blue with a new blue. Repaint it. Recolour the shade. I don’t fuckin' know. But don’t let it destroy you. We can’t sit and stare at our wounds forever, you know?”

“But what if I do?” he asked quietly.

“Then I’ll sit there with you.” Changbin said determinedly. “All of us will, until you can find it within yourself to stand up and finally walk away from it. Okay?”

Jisung closed his eyes. He rested his head against Changbin’s shoulders and wondered when his friend had gotten so strong enough to carry both the heavy weight of him and his dad’s ghost. Jisung realized they’ve all grown, even though the only growing Jisung had done over the past few years was grow more tired.

As the stars appeared after the sunset, Jisung thought about the handful of dust left behind from the photos. But then he thought about the glacial light in Hyunjin’s eyes, the smell of cedarwood wrapped around his shoulders, the clumsy attempt at comfort spilling past pale bitten lips that bled like guilt, the searing warmth that continued to linger around Jisung’s hands and sunk deep into his flesh. His bluish voice, the sound of silver bells, an echo from a dream. His lithe fingers moving with bruised familiarity like he was holding onto things that won’t hold still. 

There, in the blue afterglow of the world, Jisung finally said, “Okay.”


	4. heart, lungs, adrenal glands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had so much trouble with this chapter so i apologize in advance for, like, any bad writing TwT;; i was faced with a bad block so i was listening to [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzfqAE6vUg0&ab_channel=FearlessRecords) a lot! 
> 
> at this point, i think i'm looking at 7 chapters, but i'll see how much i can squeeze in the next one before changing the amount of chapters,,
> 
>  **warnings:** mentions of past child abuse, referenced/implied past & _described_ (not super explicitly in my opinion) parental suicide, alcoholism, implications of parentification, indications of depression/a depressive episode 
> 
> stay safe! take care!

Jisung came down with a cold.

It was predictable, considering he never took care of himself properly, and staying out in the middle of winter with inadequate outerwear while stepping in puddles of freezing ice water must have been the last straw for his immune system. That was how he ended up taking a week off of work to sweat out his fever in bed, with Changbin regularly checking up on him to shove acetaminophen and water down his throat and bringing warm, herbal soup made by Ms. Kang for him to drink.

He drifted from dream to dream, memory to memory. All memories of his dad were bathed in sepia, wild raw honey, arrows of saffron -- water trapped in a piece of amber quartz. Long gone, but not forgotten.

A memory like his usually never worked in his favour. Jisung remembered too much, too clearly. He never knew where to put it all down.

In one of his dreams, he saw a great blue heron with its yellow dagger-like bill and head of black plumes curled like a slender statue and unfurled like a menacing motion. Jisung was earthbound, tethered to the soil, watching the heron fly over his head in a graceful arc before it landed in the algae-covered pond.

“ _They’re a majestic kind of waterbird_ ,” his dad spoke from behind. He sounded faraway, almost ghost-like. “ _One of them once led me around the lake perimeter at Parker Canyon. Whenever I got within about 50 feet of him, he would take off and find a new spot further down the shore. It surprised me that they’re so skittish, since no one in history had ever wanted to eat them. Even so, it’s sad how people create their own kind of menace for these birds_.”

Jisung glanced over his shoulder to find that his dad was not his dad but a faceless stranger, a disembodied voice, a torn mannequin. Jisung looked back to see that the great blue heron had left behind a feather in its departure, scared off by the sight of a little boy holding the hands of a broken man.

There was a sudden, light scent of cedarwood. Something soft brushed against his cheek and brought Jisung back to his room that was in total darkness, save for a strip of moonbeam that spilled through his curtains.

Jisung still couldn’t move. He looked up at the silhouette standing over him, the outline of its face framed by curtains of shadows. It wore silver, almost blue in the moonlight, earrings.

It held up a lithe hand and slowly brought it to Jisung’s jaw -- the faintest, feathery touch that dissolved like a snowflake. Then, it brought its hand down to the left side of Jisung’s chest. It pressed its fingertips against his skin with enough force that could leave behind indentations until warmth began to spread across Jisung’s bare, cold body.

There was an irrational rise of panic. Jisung was able to move, then, seizing the silhouette’s wrist. He couldn’t see its face, but Jisung recognized that bluish voice anywhere.

“ _You’re a lot more knowable than you think you are. I see it._ ”

His own voice sounded foreign to his ears. “See what?”

It leaned into the light and revealed the familiar scowl, the blue in the eyes that burned like the white-ring around the moon, the parting of the lips. Jisung felt red-hot in the stomach but cool in the lungs.

“ _You_ ,” it murmured. “ _I see you._ ”

It wrapped its hand around Jisung’s neck and squeezed.

Then, his eyes snapped open.

The lights outside in the hall spilled through the gaps of his door and washed over his walls in a dim yellow. Jisung heard unfamiliar laughter in the living room, followed by Changbin’s shrill litany of curses. He was sweaty and icky all over with a faint ache pulsing at the back of his head.

His jellyfish heart pounded in his ears. Jisung held in his breath for four and out for eight. He repeated the process until he felt less like a skein of barbed wire. He pried his fingers open from the iron grip he had around his blanket and got out of bed, waiting for the dizzy whir of colours to disappear when he'd stood up too fast.

He went to the bathroom first to relieve the ache in his bladder, and splashed cold water onto his face. The person he saw in the mirror today looked like the faceless creature in his dream. Jisung shut his eyes. To be seen felt like a penalty.

He scrubbed his hands raw until the white scars on his knuckles protruded among pink skin and left the bathroom. When Jisung pottered into the living room, he was promptly greeted by the sight of Changbin doing push-ups by the kotatsu with Jeongin happily sitting on top of his back, who noticed Jisung lingering by the doorway.

“Oh, hey,” Jeongin greeted. “Welcome back to the world of the living.”

“What? You’re awake?” Changbin barely completed his third push-up before he collapsed onto the floor, making Jeongin keel over from the sudden fall. Changbin rolled over and stood up, approaching Jisung to place the back of his hand against his forehead. “Okay, well, your fever broke, so that’s good, but you should have stayed in bed. What if you fainted or something?”

“I’m fine. I’ve been in bed for a week,” Jisung rasped and coughed into his arm, grimacing at his dry and itchy throat.

“A week and a half,” Jeongin corrected, standing up from the floor. “I’ll go get you water. You look like you’re about to shrivel up and die right there like a poor plant.”

“Get him some food too,” Changbin called. Jeongin flashed him a thumbs-up as he tread past them to head into the kitchen. Jisung looked back at Changbin.

“Why’s he here?”

Changbin shrugged. “He wanted to come by to talk about Hyunjin, but then he brought up wanting to dye his hair to platinum -- which I totally don’t get, because look at him! He looks good with teal, doesn’t he? -- but then he said it was turquoise and not teal, so we started fighting about _that_ until we decided to release our pent-up stress by working out.”

Jisung stopped listening after the mention of his name. “Hyunjin. Was he here?”

It was a clear mistake to have asked that as soon as Changbin slanted him a puzzled look. “No,” he drawled. “He was never here. Why?”

Jisung thought back to the silhouette and at how ghastly real everything felt, with its strong fingers pressed against his chest and emanating a searing warmth that swept across his skin -- almost reminiscent of the grand, unfurling motion of the great blue heron.

He felt the heat of mortification pool in his gut. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Jisung always dreamed about his dad and nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. He didn’t know what it meant. “Nothing.”

But it wasn’t nothing for Changbin, whose face indicated he had caught on quickly, because he always did.

“Oh,” he said, blinking slowly. “Must have been a pretty realistic dream, huh.”

Jisung didn’t answer. He watched as Jeongin returned with a plate of sweet potatoes, a bowl of pickled radishes and a tall glass of cold water, and placed them on top of the kotatsu. Jisung sent Changbin a sharp, threatening look before he sat down with a quiet thanks. After a while of nibbling at the radishes, he felt Changbin drape the throw blanket around his shoulders, and relaxed just a bit.

Changbin loved him too much to ever hate him. Jisung had rearranged the murky blue in his chest to allow space for those bright, blue words to nestle in.

Once he was done eating, Jisung brought his plates to the kitchen. He drank another glass of water before he washed the dishes. He went to his room to grab his jacket before he slipped out onto the balcony. Jisung looked behind his shoulder and saw the two huddled close together exchanging whispers.

The cold brought a sense of relief. He leaned against the railing with an endless ache in his bones, a cigarette poised between his lips, and as he looked up past the wading smoke, the moonlit sky reminded him of the hair that framed the silhouette’s face.

That irked him even more. Jisung screwed his eyes shut, trying to rid away the images, but all he saw were his hands wearing blue. Hands on his. Hands that turned pink. Hands that left behind a hunger for the same warmth that made Jisung want nothing more than to scrub the sensation away. The hunger felt like the hands around his neck.

So, he thought of the great blue heron instead -- the majesticity, the loneliness. His dad had seemed like superman back then: strong and brave, diving through oceans and exploring safaris to study creatures, capturing wild life in the most brilliant ways, and bringing wonders of the world back for Jisung to see in their little kitschy house.

But growing up meant losing people. Jisung watched his father decay inward like he was watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill. Addiction aged him, changed the texture of his skin --- maybe a rite of decadence, when the tears on his cheeks dried to putty. But that was the thing about addiction, really. It never really ended, but it did end him. It ended a lot of things.

Jisung rolled the cigarette between his fingers. This would be his rite of decadence.

He stubbed it out after he let it burn to the size of a penny. When he stepped back inside, he realized that they’d stopped whispering. They didn't seem to have noticed Jisung’s return.

“Okay, but I don’t think pissing him off while he’s in a depressive episode is gonna help him,” Changbin was saying. “He’s doing what his doctor says, he’s going to classes, he’s not completely isolating himself. He’ll be fine.”

“I _know_ that, but it’s just -- “ Jeongin let out a frustrated sigh, his brows pinched together in concern. “It snowed a lot this year compared to last few winters. It doesn’t help that I’m pretty sure he sees her every time it snows.”

“See who?”

Jeongin flinched and elbowed Changbin right in the stomach by accident that had the older yowling in pain. Jeongin quickly apologized before he shifted in seat to face Jisung. “Were you eavesdropping?”

“God, since when did you work out so much, dude?” Changbin complained, curling up in a ball. “You literally winded me!”

“It’s not eavesdropping when you’re speaking at a normal volume in _my_ living room,” Jisung retorted, hooking his jacket over the armrest of the couch before he went to sit across from them at the kotatsu. “Who does he see?”

Jeongin pursed his lips. “Why don’t you ask him yourself if you care so much?”

“You want me to ask a seasonal recluse who's in the process of desiccating?” Jisung gave the barest hint of a raised brow. “It’s funny you think I care when in reality I just don’t like it when people whisper behind my back, so I might as well hear the whole story. Besides, I suppose I’m feeling a little less of an asshole after being bedridden for a whole week.” He paused for effect. “And a half.”

“Jesus,” Jeongin scowled. "I can see why you invoke such strong feelings of violence within the people you interact with."

Jisung smiled just a bit. He took that as the highest praise.

Changbin sat up after he recovered from Jeongin’s accidental sucker punch and placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. He looked at Changbin, then back at Jisung, and seemed to have some kind of internal conflict judging by the constipated look on his face. But soon enough, his shoulders dropped in resignation, and he heaved out a sigh.

“His mom,” he said. “He sees his mom.”

“I thought he liked the snow.”

“Haven’t you ever associated something with both the bad and the good?” At Jisung’s lack of reply, Jeongin rolled his eyes to the side and continued on. “Her death anniversary is on the 28th. She was a really nice lady. Troubled, yeah, but kind. She always stuffed me like a turkey whenever I came over for dinner.”

“How did she die?”

Changbin gave Jisung a puzzled look for asking in such an unaffected manner. Jeongin swallowed and cast his eyes to the side.

“Sorry, hyung, but I think that’s up to Hyunjin to talk about, not me,” Jeongin said apologetically. “Just know that it’s hard to be constantly reminded of who you lost when all you see is just their death during a time you once associated with happy memories.”

Jisung could feel Changbin's piercing gaze on him. He kept his eyes on the television, where the muted screen was replaying an old Running Man episode. He thought of his dad smiling without teeth like a shallow bowl of lips, the disposed photographs that took him back to his irrevocable childhood, the crumpled letters rotting underneath his bed. He thought of the colour blue.

Jisung clenched his hands underneath the kotatsu. “Yeah.”

“Parents, huh,” Changbin chimed in with the kind of exaggerated tone of voice he used to diffuse heavy conversations. “Gotta love ‘em!”

“I can still get rid of them for you,” Jisung intoned.

Changbin looked appalled. “Dude.”

“I’d totally crush your dad’s testicles. Just, you know -- “ Jeongin balled his hand into a fist as emphasis. “Squeeze them ‘til they explode.”

“Bro, that is _disgusting_.”

“What? You don’t wanna crush his balls?”

“That means I’d have to touch them!”

“Oh, shit. True. Dude, imagine touching the balls of your friend’s dad.”

“Do you want to die?”

Jisung picked at his ear with a pinky finger, watching the two of them discuss reproductive appendages. Since there was no possibility of returning to the prior topic at hand, he called it a day and decided to instigate. “Hey. Jeongin’s hair is neither turquoise or teal. It’s cyan.”

There was a beat of silence. Jeongin’s face froze in a mixture of a shocked grimace while Changbin’s mouth went slack. Rolling his eyes to the side, Jisung got up from the kotatsu and grabbed his jacket, shuffling back to his room to sleep off his post-fever aches. As soon as he closed his room door, he could hear Changbin demand that Jeongin get his hair shade checked by a RGB expert.

While they simmered in their colour crisis, Jisung sat in the dark and listened to the street noises outside through his open window. Later on in the night, he heard them leave, and Jisung assumed that Changbin must have gone with Jeongin since he was the type of person to walk people out to their car or bus stops to ensure their safety first.

Jisung tasted ash on his tongue and closed his eyes. He let the mold in his mind pull him down to his wading dreams.

───

When Jisung felt less like brittle sugar, he resumed his routine. He went to work. He lied down. He got up. He paced. He lied down. He slept. He got up. It was an integrated regimen, a predictable pattern he was accustomed to.

Felix dropped by during his day off to hand over containers upon containers of baked goods. He must have been extremely stressed to have baked so many goods for Jisung to indulge in.

_Please don’t let Binnie hyung know I gave those all to you. He’s gonna kill me for enabling your insane sugar intake._

Jisung paused in the middle of chewing. “I’ll keep these in my closet.”

Felix beamed and bumped their fists together.

Keeping his sugar source incognito didn’t last long when Changbin came home earlier than expected and Jisung had been in the middle of devouring his nth macaron of the day while marathoning _Sweet Home_. Jisung paused in the middle of his systematic destruction with bulging cheeks and blinked innocently up at Changbin.

“Nnghay,” he greeted with a mouthful.

“Dude,” Changbin said, disgusted, “I’m about to fucking ground you from eating sugar for the next twenty years.”

Jisung swallowed the food in his mouth. “You can’t stop me.”

“Watch me,” he scoffed, stomping forward to snatch the containers of baked goods out of Jisung’s hands. He then went into the kitchen and threw every bag of sweets into his backpack, before he hiked it back up around his shoulder and came marching back to the living room to declare, “I’m going to give all of your stupid candy to one of the guys, and I’m not gonna tell you which one and neither will they!”

“Come on,” Jisung complained, lurching forward. “Don’t do this, man.”

“You’re gonna have diabetes in less than a year if you keep this up! I’m looking out for you, you ungrateful brat.”

“I can always buy more.”

Changbin narrowed his eyes. “Not unless I confiscate them too, bitch.”

Changbin was somebody who lived up to his word, so that meant Jisung had been forcefully deprived of his favourite confectionery, leading him to cut up fruit every night to alleviate his sugar cravings. Jisung did manage to sneak a few malt milk balls when Changbin wasn’t home, but he knew every single one of Jisung’s hiding places and promptly confiscated all of the candy.

It was, quite frankly, an obstruction of free will.

(“Since when were you so dramatic?” Changbin threw a cushion at his head when Jisung explicitly expressed those exact words. “Idiot.”)

On a night where Changbin decided to sleep over at a friend’s house in order to finish up a last minute project, Chan took the liberty to drag Jisung to his favourite, family-owned local restaurant for dinner, and ordered crispy fried chicken, mung bean jelly salad, kimchi jjigae, and bossam. It was such a random yet indulging assortment of foods that had Jisung wondering if he was in another fever dream.

But Jisung knew, in the back of his head, that Chan wanted to address the day Jisung was found in the freezing cold. Chan had always been like that -- dancing around particular subjects he knew the person was sensitive to before lending quiet, if not spoken, support.

Thus, in the middle of gulping down ice water to help with his spice intolerance from the kimchi stew, Chan wiped away the tears from his eyes and said, “Food always heals the soul, Sungie, so you better eat up! Like, literally. Please. I’m dying over here. Help me out. God, why did I order this?”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Jisung acknowledged blandly, replacing the spoon of stew in Chan’s hand with a fried drumstick. “I appreciate it, but I don’t need it. Seriously. I’m okay.”

“If I say _I’m_ okay right now, would you believe me?”

“No, because it looks like that kimchi stew is about to make you take a shit so fat it’s going to rip the space time continuum.”

“ _Exactly_.”

Jisung wrinkled his nose at how Chan took a bite out of the chicken and sent a reverent moan up at the ceiling that had his eyes rolling back. “God, this is _so_ good. No other fried chicken can ever beat Korean fried chicken. Anyway! As I was saying -- I don’t think anyone’s really okay, and I’m not just talking about the spicy food. We just get really good at saying that when we don’t mean it ‘cause it’s the first thing we learn to do perfectly as kids.”

“Hyung, come on,” he muttered. “I know already.”

“If you knew, then Hyunjin wouldn’t have found you sitting like an absolute dipstick in nothing but pajamas and a pair of sopping wet slippers in the middle of winter.”

Jisung bit back a snappish reply and leaned back in his seat, swirling his iced tea with a straw. He watched Chan, famished as he was, continue on like he was simply talking about the weather.

“I think convenient TV writing has made everyone forget how extremely difficult opening up can really be. Well, media in general, not just TV writing. It’s like -- how do we talk about trauma and pain without glamourising it? I dunno either.” Chan made a happy sound after he’d slurped up a strip of mung bean. He made sure to pile some of the salad onto Jisung’s plate. “All I know is that it takes a lot of courage to talk about the things that hurt us.”

“And what hurt you?” Jisung volleyed before he could think twice.

Chan slowed down his chewing and blinked at him. His expression remained patient, unyielding -- his poise reminding Jisung of those marble sculptures of ancient Greek heroes.

“It’s kinda a long story.” He gently tapped the hearing aid in his right ear. “So, I’ll simplify it: I wasn’t always like this. Back in Australia, the folks and I lived in a trailer. They were heavy-handed. Absent. One day, when I breathed a tad too loud, the old man decided to smash my head into the railing -- twice, I think. Miraculously, I woke up, but I could no longer properly hear from my right ear. Music was all I had growing up so when that happened -- it made me wish I never woke up at all.”

Chan spoke with a certain, factual ease in his airy voice. He had forfeited eating in order to talk without his mouth full as he moved the salad around on his plate. His eye bags suddenly looked a lot heavier than they did before.

Jisung didn’t know what to say. He felt his heart tumble just a bit from hearing Chan talk about his family when it was a given sore subject. But then again, it was a sore subject for all.

“What I’m trying to get at is -- things can be hard to talk about, but it’s preferred that you do instead of hoarding everything inside until you blow up and hurt somebody, or even yourself. I’m sure you’ve heard all of this before, but just know that you don’t have to be like that.” Chan gave a sheepish laugh. As he lifted a hand to rub the back of his neck, his sleeves rolled up, and Jisung had to look away before he could catch a glimpse of what was underneath. “Like me.”

This was Chan: bright, optimistic, but hard to read.

He was shaped by the light he let through -- a mild-mannered mystery preserved like a bird's folded wing or a fan never opened. There were many things Jisung didn’t understand about him. Then again, Jisung didn’t understand a lot of things when it came to people in general other than what his dad had taught him.

But if Changbin was fierce, then Chan was gentle. If Changbin cradled his fists with warm hands, then Chan padded the bruises with feathery strokes to ease the ache. They were opposites in the ways they were the same. One dark, one light. A mismatch pair with the same clockwork and same vision -- together, an impenetrable fortress made of brass.

Jisung stared down at his plate. He didn’t know how to open his mouth without giving himself away. He glanced out the window and saw the same, heavy sky that accumulated over his head because of his dad’s added absence -- something Jisung couldn’t subtract himself from.

“My dad never hit me,” he found himself saying. “He never hurt me.”

Chan paused in the middle of putting spicy radishes onto a piece of lettuce. “Alright,” he said slowly, resuming in making his wrap. “What did he do, then?”

Jisung opened his mouth. _He taught me how to play guitar_ , he wanted to say. _He taught me about the animals he photographed on his safaris. He took care of me. He wasn’t a bad person._

But it wasn't the answer Chan was looking for. The truth floated in his lungs like rising mud and Jisung swallowed it all back down for it to coagulate with the wet rot of his heart -- all muscle memory. There was no such thing as honesty when it came to his dad. “Something he can’t take back.”

Chan looked at him, his eyes softening at whatever he saw etched across Jisung’s face. He nodded and spooned a modest amount of sauce into the wrap, before he placed it onto Jisung’s plate that was already overflowing with food. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” Chan said. “Okay.”

It was decisive, it was firm. It signaled an end to the topic and Jisung finally picked up his chopsticks.

They spend another hour or so finishing up their food and talking about arbitrary things. (“Let’s invite Minho, next time. I haven’t seen him since you two broke up.” “He thinks you guys still hate him.” “What? Why would I hate him?”) (“Do you have my chocolate balls.” “Your chocolate _what_?”)

After Chan finished paying, they went up the stairs and left the residency. Jisung looked up at the stars that peeked through the haze of city pollution, his breaths condensing into a friendly shape he let linger in his palms. Maybe he should have brought the mittens, but that’d mean he’d get asked questions, and Jisung was never in the mood for dissection underneath keen eyes.

“I can give you a ride home,” Jisung offered.

Chan slanted him a horrified look. “Dude, I’m pretty sure I’m gonna throw up in your car. No offense, but you drive like a fugitive in the middle of a car chase.”

“None taken.”

They stood there together outside beneath the canopy of the restaurant entrance. Jisung felt his fingers start to itch for a smoke, but he tried to keep his hands still until he went to his car. He popped a piece of gum into his mouth to distract himself in the meantime.

“Hyung,” Jisung began, staring at the ice-crusted snow that covered the sidewalks as peppermint clogged up his nose. “I’m glad you woke up that day.”

Chan blinked at him in mild surprise. His nose and cheeks were turning pink from the cold. He opened his mouth to say something, but thought second of it when his lips pulled into a warm, dimpled smile instead.

“Yeah?” he laughed softly and bumped their shoulders together. “Me too, Jisung. Go get some rest now.”

Jisung watched him leave, the image of his back growing smaller in the wintry night, weaving between the haunting glows of the mercury vapor lamps. When Jisung could no longer see Chan, he returned to his car and smoked through two sticks before he finally went home.

The apartment felt heavy without Changbin. It was strange since he wasn’t filling up the empty spaces of the kitchen at night. So, when Jisung found himself awake where he felt like he was in the ivy, on the asphalt, lying down on the floor of flickering blue light waiting for lonely, mystic monsters to gently rearrange his limbs, he rolled out of bed and went out to the balcony for another smoke.

Finished, he came back and checked the time. It was midnight. He stared down at the date blinking up at him in white, bold font. _January 28th_.

The thing with Jisung was that -- he was not good at being a good person. If the masks he wore were taken from him, there would only be a blank space underneath, because he’d lost sight of himself for so long that he was afraid to be anything again. He lived in a way that ruined himself just so he could have a semblance of control over what he could destroy.

But he awoke that morning to the memory of those engraved sunbursts, and looked at the blue mittens placed on top of the folded scarf that no longer smelled like cedarwood. Gritting his teeth, he went out to the balcony and smoked until his lungs felt eggshell thin and icky with tar, but it didn’t help with the agitation. He thought of Chan’s receding back, flickering between the shadows and the light, the quiet comfort in his eyes.

Jisung stood there glacially aware of how ordinary was beginning to grow out of place.

“Fuck,” he said.

He went to his car.

The icy cloudlight glared through his windshield. A flock of winter birds took off across the pewter-blue sky. Jisung got out of the car.

He easily remembered which floor it was. Jisung stood before the door and stared at the brass numbers. He thought of the cicadas, the hiss of mosquitoes; the dreamy pool of yellow light that danced above his dad’s head like an aurealis. He looked underneath the welcome mat in case Hyunjin was daft enough to leave a spare key. Then, he knocked on the door.

No response. Jisung knocked again, then again, and again. He shamelessly pounded at it with a fist. Jeongin mentioned in passing that Hyunjin hadn’t left the building in a while, so Jisung doubted the day of his mother’s death would act as an incentive for him to do so. That was why he ended up kicking the door.

Before he could land another possible wood-splitting kick, the door finally wrenched open. Hyunjin snarled, “The _fuck_ is wrong with you?”

He looked exhausted. His sunken, bloodshot eyes were defined by heavy dark creases, and his complexion had an unhealthy pallidity to it. His hair was matted and greasy, knotted in tangles above his shoulders, and there were stains on his t-shirt worn thin by the years. Hyunjin stood like a fragmented, patinated statue, twisted by splintered edges and missing pieces.

“You look like absolute shit,” Jisung greeted flatly. “Let me in.”

Hyunjin scoffed and moved to close the door, but Jisung stuck his foot in before he could close it all the way. “Go away.”

“Is this how you treat your guests?”

“Guests? You were never even _invited_.”

“How rude.”

“Who told you where I lived?”

“Felix.”

“Did he put you up to this?”

“No."

“Who did? Jeongin?"

Jisung shrugged. “Nobody.”

“I don’t believe you,” Hyunjin snapped, shoulders lined by fine tremors. “Whatever you came here for -- I don’t have time for it, I don’t care, and I don’t need it. So just go the fuck away, got it?”

Jisung remained unfazed. “No.”

“What do you mean, _no_?”

Jisung was restless enough; he didn’t need an audience from the rest of Hyunjin’s neighbours who were starting to peek out into the hall at the cacophony -- though he supposed it was partially his fault, considering he banged on the door like there’d been a fire.

So, he repeated, “No.” Then, he shoved the door open with enough force to send Hyunjin stumbling back from surprise, and invited himself in.

The curtains were closed, eclipsing the studio in darkness, but Jisung could see the rumpled sheets of Hyunjin’s bed situated against the small island of his kitchenette. Jisung kicked a pile of clothes strewn across the floor to the side and went to open the curtains, allowing the sun to shine on the walls that were the colour of old blackberries.

With proper lighting, Jisung could see how much of a mess the apartment was. Unwashed dishes filled the sink, clothes laid across the floor in various heaps, and half-eaten cup noodles were left to collect flies on the table. Hyunjin came to stand in front of him. There was a storm brewing in his eyes.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Converting oxygen into carbon dioxide.”

Hyunjin gritted his teeth. “Get out.”

“No.”

“Get _out_.”

“Or what?”

“For fuck sakes,” Hyunjin spat, turning around and covering his face with his hands. “You’re making this day a whole lot fucking harder than it needs to be.”

Jisung studied his back. His thoughts circled around his mom’s orange blossoms. He could imagine them tucked beneath Hyunjin’s shoulder blades, curled over in grief, the petals falling into a pool of orange at his feet.

As Hyunjin composed himself, Jisung walked to the kitchen and rummaged through his refrigerator. There was a half-eaten bowl of soup and a molding loaf of bread, a container of kimchi, vegetables and rice cakes tucked in the far corners of the compartments, and a few apples in the controlled container. Jisung wasn’t too fond at the thought of going grocery shopping. Adulthood seemed to be just that -- groceries.

“Seriously,” Hyunjin said quietly in defeat -- in embarrassment, even, as he tried to hide the pile of clothes by his feet into the corner. “What are you _doing_?”

Jisung glanced at him, then, how the sunlight cascaded through his tangled hair and carved a prism out of the dip of his collarbones. Even as he stood there like a lost war, exposed like a Luzon bleeding-heart with those restless hands, Jisung felt the bleeding fist in his chest tumble through his rotten body that was molding from the inside out, mushrooms already blooming from the soft parts of his skull.

He could feel Hyunjin’s heavy gaze on his face. Jisung could barely look at himself; he didn’t want Hyunjin to look at him either.

“Making sure you don’t fuck up your potential future career,” Jisung finally answered.

“Since when did you care about that?”

“Never did.” Jisung took out the vegetables and rice cakes. “There’s been two idiots who haven’t stopped being annoying about you.”

“But you don’t do this,” Hyunjin said as he watched Jisung rummage through the cupboards with disbelief. “You don’t do this at all.”

“You don’t know me.”

“And if I did?”

“Then you wouldn’t have bothered to talk to me at all. In fact, you would've already been gravely disappointed,” Jisung said, grabbing the chopping board and a knife from the drawer. “Everyone is disappointing when you know someone.”

Hyunjin was quiet. Then, with a deep inhale, his shoulders sagged in resignation. He trudged to his bed and buried himself underneath the blanket, pretending to be alone despite the quiet clamor of another person’s presence.

Jisung got to work once he found appropriate ingredients to use after scouring through the cupboards and freezer. He rinsed and chopped up some spring onions before he dug up a pot and filled it with water to boil over the stove, adding in a cup and a quarter of dashi powder along with mirin and soy sauce. At a boil, he added a few dumplings he found in the freezer. In a larger pot, he filled it up with enough water to boil the udon and added the rice cakes as well to substitute fish cakes.

He re-traced his mother’s steps. It was an easy recipe he memorized from watching her cook in the kitchen as a kid while her gentle voice narrated each task. He could smell her tuberose perfume if he imagined hard enough.

Once the udon noodles and rice cakes were done, he poured them into a strainer and shook off the excess water. He filled up two bowls of servings and added the hot dashi soup, dividing the dumplings equally, and sprinkled on the spring onions as a topping.

Jisung went to clear the coffee table. He put Hyunjin's laptop on the desk. He dumped the cup noodles into the compost bin and rinsed the cups before throwing them into the trash. Jisung discovered place mats rolled up in the bottom drawer of the kitchen counter, and brought it over to place on the table before setting the food and chopsticks down.

“When’s the last time you ate,” Jisung asked.

Hyunjin remained a silent, motionless cocoon.

Jisung walked over and yanked the blanket off of him. “Hey, assclown.”

“I’m not hungry,” Hyunjin mumbled, running a hand over his face. “You’re wasting your time here. Just go home.”

Jisung went through his rolodex of methods and decided to aim for the jugular. "How'd your mom die?"

Hyunjin froze. A ragged noise left his throat and in a flash, he was out of bed. He was standing there with a fistful of Jisung’s collar, his eyes alight with brimstone. His hands were shaking as he bared his teeth at him.

“Ask me that again,” he hissed, “and I’ll do something a whole lot worse than just punching you in the fucking face.”

At that, Jisung let a smile slowly spread across his face. “You couldn’t even carry out your first threat.”

“I think you’re underestimating me a bit too much right now.”

“Whatever you say. At least it got you out of bed, right?”

Hyunjin’s glare faltered. He glanced down at his hand curled around Jisung’s collar and promptly let go. His hand went to pick at the dead skin on his lips instead.

Jisung shrugged and went to sit down. He picked up his chopsticks and began slurping up the udon. It was good -- not as good as his mom’s, but enough of an emulation. Hyunjin stood there, watching him eat peacefully as his restless hands moved from his broken lips to his necklace to the hem of his thin shirt. Soon enough, the anger bled out of Hyunjin as quickly as it had boiled over, and he took a seat as well.

Hyunjin stared down at the noodles like he didn’t know what they were and what he was supposed to do with them. He eventually picked up his chopsticks and ate the udon piece by piece, taking modest bites out of a single noodle, until his appetite gradually cooperated with him and he began to eat less reluctantly.

The sounds of metal chopsticks clinking against porcelain bowls filled the silence between them in the apartment. Jisung waited until Hyunjin was finished before collecting their bowls to take to the sink. Hyunjin slunk back into bed as Jisung washed the dishes.

Once the dishes were done, Jisung went about the apartment picking up dirty clothes and shoving them all into the hamper. He tidied up most of the mess, though he left the questionable stain on the table to accumulate, before he went to lean against the windowsill and stuck his head out to smoke for a bit.

The sun had reached its peak in the sky. Standing directly underneath its light reminded Jisung of the sunfish.

“ _Sunfish_?”

“ _They’re also known as the mola mola._ ” His dad held up the photo of the daft creature surrounded by lanterns of jellyfish like floating glimmer. “ _They sunbathe to increase their body temperature since they lose heat easily from their large bodies -- hence their name. They also use their modified dorsal and anal fins for agile propulsion to make up for their lack of tail._ ”

“ _Wow! It’s so big_ ,” Jisung mused softly, running a small thumb over the photo. “ _But it looks so lonely without a tail.”_

“ _That’s why I think we humans are a bit like the sunfish, don’t you think? Too big for our own good, always craving warmth as we lose it, moving through life in such a slow, clumsy manner -- scared of our own kind and by anything that moves at all._ “

He could imagine his dad pressing his mangled bones up against the plaster, peeling off the paint, outgrowing the walls and drowning in the blue that dripped from his eyes -- the blue of his veins, the blue of his track marks, the deeper, dreamier, melancholy of blue.

As he smoked in the sun’s presence, Jisung felt a bit just like the sunfish.

After he was done, Jisung closed the window half-way and stepped back. Rummaging through the pocket of his jacket, he took out the blue mittens and placed them on top of the desk. There was a framed photo of Hyunjin, Jeongin, and Seungmin holding hands and posing in front of the Han River. They looked young and happy, yet to be scathed by the unvarnished grime of real life. The glimmer in Seungmin’s eyes hadn’t been there when Jisung had met him on the day of Chan’s move, already long gone.

Hyunjin didn’t talk for the longest time. Jisung sat down on the floor by the foot of the bed and leaned against the frame. He wasn’t sure what he was still doing there -- what he was waiting for, but he didn’t make a move to leave. He dozed off in the sunlight like a wilted houseplant.

In the dream of his nap, Jisung had been searching for something he couldn’t reach, until he awoke to the setting sun, a sky of fire; bright, warm corals of the wintry hearth -- the same shade of orange as his mother’s favourite blossoms. He rubbed his bleary eyes and stretched out his limbs.

Jisung looked over his shoulder to find Hyunjin still in the same position: rolled up in his blanket facing the wall with tufts of black hair peeking out. Jisung would have thought he was asleep again if it weren’t for the telltale sign of a stifled cough.

Hyunjin wouldn’t talk for a long, long time. Jisung knew that. They were both the same in that regard -- they didn’t like to talk. They didn’t know how to talk, maybe. But then, at some point, Jisung could feel it -- the oddly sensitive atmosphere. It was a silence that hung in the air like the suspended moment before a falling glass shattered on the floor.

And when Hyunjin finally spoke, belatedly answering that knife-deep question, his voice sounded like the glass shards had dug into his skin.

“She put a knife in her throat.”

Jisung stilled, but slowly rested his cheek against the edge of the mattress. It was strange, learning the contours of another person’s grief.

“She’d went through five bottles of wine before she woke me up in the middle of the night to take me outside,” he rasped. “It was snowing. I was twelve. I didn’t know what was happening until I saw her bring it to her neck. Next thing I knew, she was on the ground and the snow was turning red.”

Jisung closed his eyes. How blue, winter was. How scared of the light they all were. Nobody was born knowing how to forget shit like that.

“I remember it clearly, sometimes -- how the snow turned red under her body, how I pressed my hands against her neck and called for help. She died at the same spot where we built my first snowman.” There was a furious sniffle before Hyunjin sat up. He kept himself hidden underneath the blanket. “I don’t really remember the sound of her voice anymore, and her voice was the prettiest.”

“Well,” Jisung murmured. “Heavy drinking does lead to lapses in memory.”

Hyunjin let out a tiny, bitter laugh. “Yeah. Shit, yeah. Right after her funeral, I took out the bottle of Sauvignon she never got to finish under her bed and finished it for her. You can imagine how that turned out for me after that. Like mother like son, right?’

Jisung looked at his ghostly figure in recognition -- the bearer of consequences of a family disease. There was a wave of understanding that receded just as quickly as it advanced.

When he was young, he used to watch his father fill a pinot glass to the very brim with a clear, distilled liquid, before he took it back into his study. Jisung had read about how chalices represented something special and symbolic, so he would take the same fancy cup from the cupboards and pour orange juice in it, pretending to be just as woozy as it made his dad.

He believed that a ruinous thing would be able to mend the sudden distance between them, but he’d been naive. It didn’t take long for Jisung to realize it wasn’t the shape of the cup that made his dad so sick.

Jisung sat there unsure of what to say. He had a distrust with language. The words he proffered wouldn’t be able to bridge the gap between bodies. But at some point amidst his overthinking, his hand was up before he could register what he was doing. Jisung tugged at the end of the blanket and asked, “Can I?”

A beat of silence followed.

“Yeah,” Hyunjin said softly.

Jisung climbed onto the bed and slid underneath the blanket, where he was met with Hyunjin’s unkempt face. It felt like he was stepping inside a dark cave feeling along the walls and bumping into jagged edges, crossing a threshold he knew he shouldn’t have in the back of his mind.

But he sat there, watching Hyunjin thread his fingers through his matted hair to busy his skittish hands. He knew the body language of a bad liar.

“Somebody living in my old house sent me my childhood photos. I didn’t like it so I reacted badly.”

Hyunjin blinked at him in confusion, using his collar to wipe away the snot from his nose, but it didn’t take long for his foggy brain to understand Jisung’s words were apropos to the offered deal at the bench from the other day. “Oh,” he said slowly. “...Why didn’t you like it?”

“Reminded me of what I don’t have anymore,” he answered listlessly.

“And what’s that?”

“A lot of things.”

“Like music?”

Jisung glared. Even when Hyunjin was a bereaved mess, he still had it in him to poke and prod at the tender bruises much to Jisung’s annoyance. Truly no rest for the peevish.

Hyunjin took his silence as an answer and smiled a bit. He pinched the charm of his necklace and oscillated it back and forth between the chain. “Childhood felt like it’d last forever, didn’t it?” A pause. “Maybe I could have protected her if I was stronger.”

“You were twelve.”

“I was old enough to know she was hoarding alcohol underneath her bed.” His hand was gripping his thigh, pinching his skin through the fabric of his sweatpants. Jisung wanted to snatch it away. “I was old enough to know she was going to end it all one day.”

“You were _twelve_ ,” Jisung emphasized, trying to steady his trembling fists. He thought of the green grass beneath his feet as he watched his dad chase after dragonflies on a blue, sunny day. He thought of the unpaid bills on the table, the grime on the floors that he scrubbed away until dusk, the exhaustion that came from staying up late at nights to take care of his dad when he'd drank too much for his body to handle. He thought of the empty bottles, the needles, the knife on the floor as he watched his dad be taken away over a mistake he could never take back. “You were a damn kid. _She_ was supposed to protect you, not traumatize you for the rest of your fucking life and lead you down the same path as her. You’re not responsible for your parent’s choices. That’s on _them_. That’s something they have to take to their grave, not you.”

Hyunjin couldn’t look at him. “She was sick.”

“So was mine,” he retorted. “So were we. But we got out of that hole when they couldn’t. We’re not them.”

“They’re family.”

“Yeah, yeah. Blood is thicker than water -- whatever. But haven’t you heard?” Jisung reached forward to circle a tentative hand around Hyunjin’s wrist, pulling his hand away from his thigh before he could leave a bruise on his own leg. “Nothing grows in blood.”

Hyunjin blinked up at him, his lips bleeding from the incessant gnawing. He brought his hand up to cover them, muffing his voice in the process. “Yeah,” he agreed quietly. “Nothing does.”

They fall silent. Jisung watched Hyunjin close his eyes and think. About what, Jisung didn’t know. Words could never cure a child’s inheritance of the family sickness. Jisung wanted nothing more than to amputate the limb that tethered him to his childhood despite sowing it back together again like a regret of a regret --- a cycle of disgusting, morbid nostalgia.

But then Hyunjin covered his entire face with his hands, curling forward like he was trying to become smaller than he really was. “Can you talk about something else right now?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Anything. Just anything. You don’t know how to shut the hell up anyway so it shouldn’t be hard.”

Jisung scoffed. He pretended to think about it. “Okay.”

He talked about ancient, ostentatious things. Dinosaurs and fossils. The regal uncurling of a fern. Trees that grew from ruins and wreckage. Findings of coprolite. Marble wings of Icarus left behind in an abandoned temple. And then, as his mind wandered, Jisung brought up how a blue whale’s heart was the size of a Volkswagen.

Jisung told Hyunjin to imagine himself inside it -- hunkered low in a red chamber, the bloody backseat, touching the wet walls with his splayed fingers, the frame around him shifting from the heartbeat pulsing every eight seconds, echoing into the deserted metropolis of the surrounding sea. If he laid his head into the tissue of the upholstery, the sinew and the gristle, he would be able to hear the loud and quiet murmurs of the sea’s heart.

Jisung didn’t know how long he talked, but by the time he was tired of talking, he realized he’d closed his eyes. When he opened them, Hyunjin was looking at him. His necklace was backwards, his lips bleeding, but there was something in his eyes Jisung didn’t recognize -- something blue, something tender. Always something.

There was churn in his stomach. Jisung couldn’t stand to be looked at like that. _To be seen felt like a penalty._ He was suddenly overcome with stark awareness of where they were, what they were doing -- the embarrassment at being caught in the middle of something soft with someone dangerous, so Jisung quickly lifted up the blanket and scooted out.

“I’m going out for a drive.”

Hyunjin peeked out from underneath the blanket, slightly puzzled. "What?"

“You have ten minutes.” Jisung grabbed his jacket. “Either stay here with your brain rot or get some fresh air. Your choice.” Then he shut the door behind him.

Outside underneath the fading sun, Jisung leaned against the trunk of his car and stuck a cigarette in his mouth to light it, shielding the flame with one cupped hand. He hiked up his shoulders in an attempt to shield himself from the wind.

He didn’t come here to comfort. Jisung didn’t _do_ comfort. He wasn’t sure why he came here in the first place or what he was looking to get out of visiting Hyunjin on such a morbid day, but maybe he’d always been unsure since the moment Jisung met him. It was annoying. It was unnerving.

But Jisung told himself that this was because he didn’t like being indebted to people, that this was to pay Hyunjin back for lending him warmth at the bench when he wasn’t obligated to.

By the time ten minutes was up, Jisung went to the driver's door, thinking he’d just go home. But then he heard the dragging of feet against the bitumen and he looked up to find Hyunjin walking towards him, bundled up like a snowman with his scarves and all of his hair tucked inside his toque. Against the pale glow of the sunset, Jisung could see just how much the season had eroded the light in Hyunjin’s eyes.

“You look bald,” Jisung commented.

Hyunjin tilted his head skyward and sighed. “You are despicable.”

Jisung unlocked the doors. Inside the car, he snuffed out his cigarette against the ashtray and cranked up the heater. He pulled out of his parking spot and negotiated the road until he hit the highway.

He drove aimlessly with no destination in mind. Hyunjin fiddled with the radio and skipped through nearly all the channels before he settled on a station that was playing an indie pop song. They listened to exactly thirty seconds of it until Hyunjin turned the radio off with hands that wouldn’t stay still.

“Can you sing?” asked Hyunjin.

“Wow.” Jisung’s hands around the wheel tightened. “I knew you were stupid, but in your case, it’s terminal.”

“I want to listen to you.” Hyunjin ignored the jab. “Can you sing?”

He considered braking in the middle of the road to scare Hyunjin into retracting his request, but thought second of it. “No.”

“But it’s just me.”

“And? What makes you think I’ll just do whatever you say?”

“I’m not saying, I’m _asking_.” Hyunjin scoffed tiredly and leaned his head against the window. “You’re the one who invited me in the first place. If you wanted a peaceful, long drive without a mourning pseudo-friend in your car, then you shouldn’t have invited me. Take accountability.”

Jisung clenched his jaw. He jerked the car into the next lane, causing the wheels to suddenly screech. “What would I get out of it?”

There was a moment of silence. Then, Hyunjin threw the bait. “Changbin hyung gave me your stash of candy to hide. If you sing for me, I’ll give all of them back to you.”

“Of course he did,” Jisung drawled, unamused. “Of course it’s you.”

“Of course it’s me,” Hyunjin parroted, his subtle laugh wading into a quiet, thoughtful hum. “There’s a song of yours I liked the most,” he whispered. “Reminded me of my mom a lot when I first listened to it.”

Jisung immediately knew which one he was talking about. It was the song that came to him right after he finished a documentary on an orangutan mother protective of her young. There had been a scene where they showed the mother hugging her child with a blanket draped over their heads, until a scene of the orangutan child hugging himself came along, his mother no longer in sight.

The grief of absence was almost universal. It was a constant presence, devoted to every living being like a mother’s love.

Jisung had written it in one sitting. It’d been too personal so Jisung never publicly shared it. He’d forgotten that Chan had most of his files saved, even though Jisung had angrily snapped at him to erase them all the day he quit music.

“The person who sang it back then is a different person now,” Jisung said quietly. “He doesn't sound the same.”

Hyunjin shrugged. He fogged up the window with his breath and drew a star. “People change.”

Jisung bit the inside of his cheek. He pressed down on the accelerator.

It took him a while to work up to it. Somewhere in the bone-dome of his skull rattled a single thought telling him to not open his mouth, to keep quiet and swallow the familiar melody down his throat to coalesce with the breeding ground of rot inside his body. He’d quit this. There was no use in going back, even if it was just a temporary stop. He couldn’t quit quitting.

It gave him tremors. It felt like pewter through skin. Just like the blue whale’s bloody chamber, Jisung could hear the lub dub of the sea’s heart -- but this time, maybe, it was his own.

He took in a sharp breath. The colour of the sky dissolved on his tongue when he wet his lips and let the first few words come out of his mouth in clumsy, quiet notes.

His voice was scratchy, unclear and unused. It sounded awkward, feeble, uncertain because Jisung hadn’t sung in so long even if it was a whispering kind of singing. He wanted to hide the cracks and the mumbled lyrics, but then he felt it like the line on his palm -- the sound of Hyunjin’s voice humming along to his terrible, terrible singing, tapping his blue-covered hands against his knee as he looked out the window.

Hyunjin glanced at him from the corner of his eye, a small smile tugging at the edge of his lips, eyes reflecting the dark blue of the darkening sky. A glimmer in the gloom.

Jisung looked away and pretended it didn’t mean anything.

And so, with their tangle of dissonant voices, Jisung drove them towards the sunset and into the blue underworld full of hungry, sweet ghosts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all for the lovely and supportive comments. they truly make my day even though i am a slowpoke at replying !! <3 dads will be talked abt soon 😔


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